Five or so years ago, as Rep. Bill Frank, an Underhill Democrat, remembers it, he helped guide a bill through the Legislature setting up a computerized prescription drug data base to prevent people from getting prescriptions for the same drug from two or three different doctors, either to sell the surplus or to over-medicate themselves.

It worked. Gov. Jim Douglas’s Administration set up that data base after only, as Frank remembers it, three and a half years.

“Sometimes you just have keep track,” Frank said Every January I would have the person who was in charge of setting up the system come into our (House) committee (on Human Services). Just sort of on my own.”

It wasn’t, Frank said, that he and his fellow lawmakers were being stonewalled.

“Whenever I called the commissioner they were very responsive,” he said. ”I’d get answers. But I sometimes wondered: Is this the role of legislators? To follow whether the laws are implemented?”

Maybe it is.

If so, the Vermont Legislature works under certain disadvantages. It is, as Frank noted, “a citizen legislature,” which, he said “works great, but basically we can’t do oversight only for three or four months a year when the legislature is in session.”

Whether or not it “works great,” another way to describe a “citizen legislature” is “amateur legislature.” The $625.36 a week salary (only when the Legislature is in session) is one of the lowest in the country. Even the leaders, who get extra pay, have day jobs. House Speaker Shap Smith works at a law firm. Senate President Peter Shumlin operates a business in Putney.

Individual legislators don’t have staff, either, as they do in most states. There is a Legislative Council’s office, with a staff of 35 (that’s not just professionals; that includes support staff), and the 13-person Joint Fiscal Office. A few aides work for the leaders and some committees, but according to Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst at the National Council of State Legislators, “Vermont has one of the smallest, if not the smallest, staff of any legislature.”

The Governor may work just down the hall from the legislative chambers. But his is a real job, paying a tad more than $150,000 a year, the tenth highest of the 50 governors. He appoints six agency secretaries, each of whom also earns more than $100,000 a year, and the heads of 21 commissions and six boards. Every one of them is fully staffed. Almost every one has a public relations spokesperson and one worker who, whatever his or her job description, lobbies the Legislature.

Not that the governor’s administration (not capitalized here because it would apply to any governor of either party) is the Legislature’s only source of information. Lobbyists for all sorts of business and causes assail lawmakers with facts (or alleged facts) and analysis almost every day, and the legislative staff regularly runs the numbers on tax and spending proposals.

Still, there is no doubt about which branch of government outweighs the other when it comes to making its case to the press, the public, the entire political process.

As in most states, the Vermont Legislature gets most of its information about the executive branch from the executive branch. Up to a point, lawmakers seem satisfied with the cooperation they get.

“I have had no trouble with having commissioners or agency secretaries come before my committee,” said Ann Pugh, the South Burlington Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Social Services. If she summons lower-level officials, she said, they appear, too, but they “usually come with their boss. I understand the position they are in. They represent the governor.”

But like many legislators, Pugh said she sometimes thinks administration officials hold back information.

“When the initial personnel cuts being discussed in 2007 I was told, we won’t know until June 30 who we’re going to lay off July 1,” she said. I kept asking them about what would be the impact in terms of the service the state could provide.”

She said she never got a satisfactory answer.

As explained in Friday’s post (just scroll down), Vermont legislators might have a harder time getting information from the executive branch because the state is one of the few in which legislative committees do not have the power to issue subpoenas.

“We can’t question people under oath, either,” said Rep. Tony Klein, the East Montpelier Democrat who chairs the Hose Committee on Natural Resources and Energy. “For most part it hasn’t been necessary, but there have been times, I won’t tell you somebody lied, but they certainly didn’t give the full picture.”

Like other Democrats, Klein said Douglas runs “a very controlling administration,” including restrictions on allowing some state officials to appear before a legislative committee unless their supervisor was also present.

Both Klein and House Majority Leader Floyd Nease of Johnson said that the Douglas Administration has more public relations aides than any previous administration, and sometimes sent them, rather than officials actually responsible for the functions of government, to appear before legislative committees. The administration, both Democrats said, was more intent on “staying on message” than sharing information.

That the Douglas administration has more flacks than its predecessors is not debatable, having been documented by Shay Totten in Seven Days. But just as Douglas employs more PR people than Dean, it is likely that Dean employed more than Richard Snelling before him, who had more than Madeleine Kunin before him, who had…

All administrations, state and federal, Democratic and Republican, want their officials to stay “on message.” If earlier Vermont administrations were less vigorous in enforcing that rule, it was probably because until recently both the governor and the legislative majorities were Republican, and because in the pre-television era, “message” could be controlled informally and in person.

No longer. Not just TV, but direct mail, push polling and ideological blogging have come to Vermont. The modern spin era is here, and will not disappear if the next governor is a Democrat. Unless the Legislature asserts itself, he or she is likely to be as secretive and uncooperative as the incumbent.

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House Majority Leader Floyd Nease was standing at the edge of the underwhelming crowd of perhaps 125 of the usual liberal suspects decrying Gov. Jim Douglas’s proposed budget cuts outside the Capitol yesterday when Rep. Michael Mrowocki brought him some news.

“Human Services voted not to touch V-Pharm,” said Mrowicki, a Democrat from Putney. “Unanimously.”

Maybe those liberals don’t have to bring out a big crowd to get their way. They’ve got the Legislature.

And maybe the President.

V-Pharm, which helps lower-income, older people pay for their prescription drugs, is one of the state programs on the Douglas chopping block. In his budget address last month, the governor called for eliminating V-Pharm, saving, according to one legislator’s estimate, as much as $3 million.

Forget that, is essentially what the Human Services Committee – including its three Republicans – told Douglas yesterday. Before the process is over sometime in April, that message seems likely to be repeated for a great many of the governor’s other proposed cuts.

Not that anyone should underestimate Douglas. He is tenacious, he has veto power, and he has the Recession. The more the economy declines and state revenues fall, the stronger grows his argument that spending has to be cut simply because there isn’t enough money.

Certainly he has more than held his own vis a vis Democratic legislatures in recent years, each session ending with the governor and the legislative leaders reaching a budget agreement which gave Douglas most of what he wanted.

But this year the Democrats may be made of sterner stuff, for the following reasons:

–Their majorities are even bigger; the 96 of them and just four of the five Progressives and two independents could over-ride a veto;

–Douglas has proposed much deeper cuts, arousing more fervent opposition from the several constituencies in the Democratic coalition;

–The new speaker, Shap Smith, though considered less liberal than predecessor Gaye Symington (perhaps only because he is from Morrisville rather than Chittenden County), gives every appearance of being tougher, politically shrewder, and a mainstream policy Democrat if not an out-and-out liberal, whatever that may be;

–Like Democrats everywhere, those in Vermont have been walking a little taller since January 20.

From the Democratic perspective, the benefits of that last item are not merely psychological. President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan also promises to ship billions of dollars to the states, millions of them to Vermont. Not as many millions since the Senate cut out some spending that were in the bill passed by the US House (some of which may be restored in the House-Senate Conference now under way), but enough to avoid at least some of Douglas’s proposed spending cuts.

Money bills start in the House of Representatives, and Nease said that the House leadership has “put pretty much aside” the governor’s budget proposals of last month and are “writing our own.” The work, he said, is going on largely in the Appropriations Committee, chaired by Martha Heath of Westford, but Nease, Smith, and others are also working on it.

He didn’t go into specifics, but in recent weeks Smith, Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, and other leading Democrats have talked about bringing the budget into balance by using all four mechanisms available – cutting some programs, borrowing some money, dipping into the Rainy Day Fund, and what they usually call “revenue,” though occasionally refer to by its real name: taxes.

Politicians do not like to raise taxes, or even to mention the possibility. So when they go on radio programs or sit for newspaper interviews and mention the possibility, they must (a)  be serious about the possibility; and (b) be sending the idea into the political atmosphere to see how much   anger it arouses.

So far, it doesn’t seem to have aroused much. A few letters to the editor, but no apparent outpouring of fury from anywhere. Outwardly, in fact, there seem to have been at least as many Vermonters saying they’d be willing to pay a little more to maintain social programs at current levels as saying higher taxes would drive them out of the state.

The outward appearance, though, might not reflect the deeper reality. That demonstration under the Golden Dome yesterday illustrated something about the asymmetry of Vermont politics. As former State Rep. Barbara Postman, one of the organizers of the “One Vermont” rally, candidly acknowledged, the turnout was disappointing. Worse, there was some confusion about the starting time, so the TV news cameras had left before some of the most compelling speakers came to the microphone.

Still, they were there, right out in the open. Advocates of services for the poor, the sick, the elderly, the homeless, the mentally ill. They were there and they were energetic and attentive, especially to the two young autistic men, one of whom, Tracy Thresher, who apparently can not speak in public, addressed the crowd via a facilitated communication device.

The other side of this debate – the side that agrees with Douglas – does not hold rallies at the Statehouse. It couldn’t if it wanted to, but it doesn’t want to and doesn’t have to. This does not mean that it less powerful, only that its power expresses itself differently.

This faction is led by the governor, and includes such business groups as the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Northern Vermont (Douglas is scheduled to speak at its annual dinner next Tuesday), the editorial page of the Burlington Free Press. Only the last of those regularly speaks in public.

But all of it together has clout, and could steel the governor to veto a budget passed by the Legislature. Nothing is going to happen for a few weeks. To begin with, until Congress comes up with its final bill, lawmakers won’t know how much extra money Vermont will get. And this year, both houses are taking a two-week break in early March for Town Meeting instead of the traditional one-week recess.

So the showdown is likely to come in April. What looms then is an interesting game of chicken. In most of the Douglas years, it has been the Democrats in the legislature who gave way first. This time the Democrats are strutting in a more roosterly manner. And as that Human Services Committee vote indicated, they may have convinced a few Republicans to walk their way.