At a time when national politics has degenerated into threats of inaction — and worse — the bipartisan support for the state budget is welcome.
Last week, the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee unanimously approved a budget for the next two years that reduced state spending to close a budget gap of about $310 million. The House is expected to begin deliberations today.
“As I look to Washington today and around the country to other states, Democrats and Republicans are unable to work together,” Gov. John Baldacci said in his weekend radio address.
“In Maine, though, it’s different. Despite the most difficult economy since the Great Depression, Democrats and Republicans have been able to put aside partisanship and work together to put Maine on the right track,” he continued. “And they’ve done it at a time when the odds have been stacked against them.”
At the beginning of the year, the state faced a budget gap of more than $438 million, as Maine, like other states, saw steep declines in tax revenues because of the recession. The governor ordered immediate spending reductions and proposed a biennial budget with steep cuts in education and health and human services spending. (These two areas account for about 80 percent of state spending.)
A coalition of groups called for tax increases to dull the cuts to social services. Rather, the governor did the hard work of better aligning state spending with revenues — work that must continue under the next administration.
At the same time, however, the governor’s budget likely will result in tax increases at the local level as towns scramble to fund their schools and other services, although this was muted by improvements in the economy and federal stimulus funding. As a result, the budget gap shrunk to $310 million, allowing for smaller cuts to education and human services.
“Republicans rejected draconian cuts to vital services for Maine’s most vulnerable, including home health for the elderly and, deep across-the-board cuts that would have jeopardized nursing home residents,” Senate Republican leader Kevin Raye said in his radio message.
“Working in a bipartisan manner with our colleagues across the aisle, we softened the impact of the cuts by almost entirely restoring the cuts to nursing homes, and adding an additional $1 million to home-based care — services that give our elderly and disabled a better quality of life, and also save the taxpayers untold dollars,” the senator from Perry added.
The budget also puts $7 million into the state’s rainy day fund, which had been drained. A plan to merge the state’s natural resources agencies — an overdue effort to reduce duplication — was scaled back, but so was a “payroll push,” a scheme that would have moved a few days of payroll into the budget cycle that would have fallen under the next governor’s tenure.
There are things in the budget that can be criticized. But, given the economic circumstances, Republicans and Democrats are to be praised by coming together to put together a responsible budget that will pay the bills for the next two years while better positioning the state for the future.