|
Oliver Hardy would utter to Stan Laurel in the midst of one of their numerous complicated dilemmas, “Well here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
These could be the words you might have heard Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher voice to Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller at the conclusion of the 2009 Legislative Session early Tuesday morning on May 19th.
If any one was watching the final minutes of the House or Senate debate late Monday night, one would have to ask the same question: How did they get into this mess?
Well to be clear, we need to rewind to the end of the 2008 legislative session, just one year ago. I wrote a story last year titled “How They Balanced (Read: Cooked) the Books,” which recapping the 2008 session. This article pointed out that legislators didn’t really balance the budget but merely pushed the 2008 budget problem down the road into the 2009 legislative session. Nearly a quarter of our budget problem, $1 billion, was due to overspending last year. Of course, who wants to control spending in an election year?
Between June and November of 2008, the bottom dropped out of the national economy and so the November state budget forecast was $4.8 billion in the red for the 2010-11 budget, or roughly a 12% shortfall.
In January, at the start of the 2009 session, the Democrat leadership spoke of budget reform and such things as zero-based budgeting. But it soon became obvious it was all just rhetoric as they played a stalling game, waiting for the Obama Administration to hand out billions of federal dollars that would bailout state governments.
With the March budget forecast, the budget problem grew worse, showing a $6.4 billion shortfall. With the inclusion of federal money, Minnesota’s budget problem was now calculated to be $4.6 billion.
At the outset, Gov. Pawlenty stated he was committed to balancing the State’s budget without raising taxes and presented a proposed budget in late January with no tax increases.
The response by the DFL was to take a “misery tour” around Minnesota, to bash the Governor’s budget, even though they had no alternative budget proposal themselves.
Finally in April, the Democrats revealed their plan: massive tax increases and relatively small spending reductions. The House passed a $1.5 billion tax increase and the Senate tax bill weighed in at a hefty $2.2 billion in new taxes.
The stage was set from that point on for a showdown between the Governor’s Administration and the Legislature, with Gov. Pawlenty holding firm to “no tax increases” and the DFL controlled legislature unwilling to make the necessary spending cuts to their various favored programs.
With just 10 days before the constitutional deadline for the legislature’s adjournment, Democrats rushed through the legislative process a “smaller” $1 billion tax bill. But even if they had been able to entice the Governor to support this version, it would have left a $2 billion budget gap.
Gov. Pawlenty’s response was swift: issuing a veto of their tax bill at 3:00 a.m., just hours after the bill had passed in the House and Senate.
On May 13, the legislature completed its work on all major finance bills and sent the final appropriation bills to the Governor. The expectation was Gov. Pawlenty would veto several of the large spending bills and Round 2 of the budget battle would ensue – probably necessitating a special session.
But to everyone’s surprise, Gov. Pawlenty announced he would sign all of the Democrats spending bills, and the catch was that if the legislature could not complete the rest of the necessary budget balancing through shifts and spending cuts before Monday’s adjournment, the governor would execute line item vetoes and unallotments to unilaterally balance the budget.
The Democrats had passed spending bills totaling $34 billion and could account for only $31 billion in revenue, leaving a $3 billion budget hole.
The befuddled DFL leaders were torn regarding how to spend the remaining four days of the legislative session. Disagreement between the House and Senate leaders about how to resolve the budget lingered, with some legislators wanting to propose further cuts and others wanting to blame the Governor for the spending reductions. When in doubt, try yet another tax increase. In the final moments of the session, Democrats tried one last “Hail Mary,” passing another billion dollar tax increase along with a K-12 accounting shift. This bill, like its similar predecessor, had the same fate: a gubernatorial veto.
So with lawmakers heading home, the burden of balancing the state’s budget shortfall was left for the Governor to resolve. While ending some what more abruptly and certainly more timely than many of us had anticipated, the outcome of this session was fairly obvious from the outset. Governor Pawlenty was not going to raise taxes, there would not be three Republican House members willing to override Pawlenty’s vetoes and the Democrats just couldn’t bring themselves to reduce state spending. The 2010 session is likely to be a replay of 2009 with Democrats pushing for unsustainable levels of spending creating yet another budget mess.
This column originally appeared in the St. Paul Legal Ledger Capitol Report.
# # #
|
