Unfinished and disputed bills may stall Legislature's adjournment
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Rep. Sue Minter, D-Waterbury, center, talks with Rep. Lucy Leriche, D-Hardwick, and Rep. Floyd Nease, D-Johnson, during Thursday's legislative session. Jeb Wallace-Brodeur/Times Argus |
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By LOUIS PORTER and Peter Hirschfeld Vermont Press Bureau - Published: May 7, 2010
MONTPELIER – With a half-dozen significant pieces of legislation incomplete and major budgetary differences remaining between lawmakers and Gov. James Douglas, it now appears unlikely – although still possible – that legislators can wrap up their work by the end of the week as planned.
Senators had hoped to bring the massive Challenges for Change government restructuring bill to the floor Wednesday or Thursday. But Thursday evening, the Senate Appropriations Committee was still working through major pieces of the legislation slated to save $38 million by streamlining government.
There was also a significant amount of talk among lawmakers about the process by which the bill was being drafted and with the closed-door meetings in which it were being discussed.
House Republican leader Patti Komline, R-Dorset, said her caucus members were unlikely to suspend rules – a common end-of-session procedure – on significant pieces of legislation without having 24 hours to read the measures.
"This is just the way to shove it down everybody's throats," Komline said. "No one has a draft and it is two days before adjournment."
It was not only House members who are concerned about the changes which may be made in the Challenges bill.
"Some of the most significant decisions I have seen in 30 years are being made, with the best possible intentions, but on the fly," said State Sen. Vince Illuzzi, R-Essex/Orleans, chairman of the Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs Committee.
"Even the Republicans in Washington had a chance to read the bill before they were asked to vote for it," said Sen. Doug Racine, D-Chittenden, the chairman of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee.
Challenges for Change, which touches nearly every part of state government in one way or another, is not the only bill that remains to be worked on. The state budget, a judicial restructuring bill, a measure dealing with the "current use" program, and this year's tax bill all need some more work before they are complete.
Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, D-Windham, said he and Speaker of the House Shap Smith still believe the Legislature can complete its work by the end of the day Saturday, the time set for adjournment for 2010.
Shumlin said given that extending the legislative session past this week would require more money being spent and "in this economic climate I would suggest we suspend rules."
"I think we will have a unified family," Shumlin said.
There is one member of that family who seems far from content. Gov. Douglas again blasted lawmakers for not imposing restraints on education spending on Thursday.
"We have effectively the most burdensome property tax on the one hand and the lowest student-to-teachers ratio on the other," he said. Although Douglas praised some of the education spending measures being considered by lawmakers, they do not go nearly far enough, he said.
"I don't see any action on bending the cost curve," he said.
As lawmakers ponder budget reductions in the Challenges legislation, it remains unclear whether the cost-cutting mandates will apply to education.
The bill originally called for $23.2 million in cuts to fiscal year 2012 education costs, to be achieved by imposing a 2-percent spending reduction on every school district in the state.
But House lawmakers essentially gutted the education component of the Challenges bill, opting instead for a strongly worded resolution that asked districts to adopt the reduction targets voluntarily.
Sen. Susan Bartlett, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, was considering reinstating the cost-cutting mandate in her body's version of the bill.
"Right now we have not made a decision," Bartlett said Thursday evening.
The language under consideration in her Senate committee would impose 2-percent budget reductions at the supervisory-union level, an approach that Bartlett said would allow boards to distribute the burden over a larger number of schools.
But Sen. Bobby Starr, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, balked at the proposal. School boards, he said, exhibited admirable fiscal restraint by holding the line on school spending during the last round of budgeting.
He said lawmakers should rely on the good judgment of locally elected board members rather than send a top-down mandate from Montpelier.
"Vermonters will do most anything you ask of them, and do nothing they're told to do," Starr said. "I think we should commend them for their good work last year, and ask them to continue that good work next year."
Imposing blanket reduction mandates on schools, Starr said, is unfair to districts who have worked hard to drive down per-pupil costs already. Schools that have already eliminated programs or cut staff, according to Starr, should not be subject to the same reduction mandates as schools that have allowed per-pupil expenditures to soar.
"What we'd be doing with an across-the-board mandate is penalizing the good ones, and rewarding the ones at the extreme end of spending," Starr said.
House lawmakers used similar logic to reject the Challenges mandate. Their bill asked the Department of Education to conduct a district-by-district analysis of all 280 Vermont school districts and tailor a voluntary cost-reduction plan for each.
Bartlett, though, said she worries the advice might go unheeded.
"What if they don't meet the target," she asked.
The pressures on the education fund in fiscal year 2012, she said, are significant.
"And if we don't achieve another $23.2 million, that's even more pressure," Bartlett said.
If the Senate does opt for an education mandate, the language would still have to make it through the House, where legislators have, by a considerable proportion, already expressed their opposition to such a plan.
"We have elected local boards who build these budgets and now we're going to come in from Montpelier and tell them how to do it?" said Rep. Johannah Leddy Donovan, chairwoman of the House Committee on Education.
Donovan said she's worried cuts of that magnitude might have irreversible consequences on education quality.
"I question whether we are asking (school boards) to do the impossible," she said. "Are we going to discover, after a number of years, that we don't have high test scores in the state anymore?"
House lawmakers have imposed new health-care mandates that will require insurance companies to cover therapies and treatments for young children with autism.
The House legislation approved Thursday, which still needs concurrence from the Senate, seeks to expand treatment opportunities for children with autism who are between the ages of 18 months and 6 years.
Rep. Anne O'Brien, a Richmond Democrat, said private insurers often categorize autism-spectrum disorders as "psychological" conditions, which allows them to limit the number of patient visits. Now that the disorder has been recognized as a medical condition, she said, insurers should be required to treat it as such.
The legislation could affect a large number of Vermonters – 1 in 110 people has an autism-spectrum disorder, according to O'Brien – and she said the proposed legislation will ensure the early interventions proven to improve longer-term prospects for people with autism.
"The age group we've identified in this bill is really a good place to mandate coverage," O'Brien said. "The intensive behavioral therapies have shown some very compelling results for kids."
The bill will affect insurance premiums for all Vermonters. But O'Brien said modest increases now would save money in the long run. Nearly half of young children who receive "applied behavioral analysis" enter public schools with learning capabilities on par with their peers, according to O'Brien. Those improved outcomes could help Vermont reduce significantly the $57 million it spends annually on autism-related expenditures in education and human services.
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