Lawmakers tout budget work
Many other states still struggling with fiscal plans
If passing state budgets were like homeroom, Massachusetts would be the student who consistently slips in after the bell rings, sheepishly citing bus trouble, a faulty alarm clock, even a broken toaster.
In the previous 10 years, Beacon Hill missed the start of the fiscal year seven times, with lawmakers and the governor blowing deadline by an average of 38 days.
Not this year.
In an uncharacteristic display of alacrity, the Bay State had its budget signed, sealed, and delivered by Monday afternoon, about 32 hours before July 1, the start of fiscal year 2010.
“Feel free to pat us on the back, for the love of God,’’ said state Representative Charles A. Murphy, the chief budget writer in the House.
The resulting budget agreement hardly constitutes good news - the spending plan calls for deep cuts in state and local programs across the board. But it means lawmakers and the governor can breathe a little easier this weekend, while their counterparts in about 10 other states continue to wrestle with their budgets.
Most notable among them is California, where the projected gap between revenue and expenses has grown to $27 billion - equal to the entire annual budget in Massachusetts - and where the state has taken the almost unprecedented step of issuing IOUs instead of paying bills.
Several states have needed to pass temporary or emergency spending plans while lawmakers and chief executives wrangle over how to cut spending and raise taxes to close record, recession-induced shortfalls.
Ohio enacted its first temporary budget in 18 years. In Pennsylvania, where lawmakers are resisting the governor’s proposal to resolve a $3 billion deficit with an income-tax increase, the state may stop cutting checks to its employees until the crisis is resolved.
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Legislature finished its budget June 19, and Governor Deval Patrick signed it 10 days later, vetoing about $150 million of the $27 billion total. And they did it while passing separate, major bills to overhaul the state’s ethics, pension, and transportation laws.
That contrasts with the last three years, when the state had to pay bills with temporary budgets as negotiations spilled into July, and with 1999 and 2001 - when drawn-out debates kept the budget from being signed until Nov. 16 and Dec. 1, respectively.
While most residents might not have paid the feat much heed - or, perhaps, were distracted by the $1 billion in additional taxes included in the plan - veteran Beacon Hill observers were impressed.
“It is noteworthy that in the midst of this enormous fiscal crisis, the Legislature delivered a budget to the governor on time - a reasonably sound, if painful, budget,’’ said Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.
Patrick, House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, Senate President Therese Murray, and the budget writers all said the same thing in pre-Independence Day interviews: If they could not control the recession, they could at least control when they finished their work for the state.
“You have to be willing to sit down and say, ‘We’ll make the hard decisions,’ ’’ said state Senator Steven C. Panagiotakos, the Senate’s chief budget writer. “So why not make them sooner rather than later?’’
The parties engaged in a firmer, more efficient version of their usual give-and-take.
“There is a shared appreciation that this is a true fiscal crisis. This is more than a set of challenges,’’ said Patrick, who was reluctant to accept a sales tax increase without the ethics, pension, and transportation reform measures from lawmakers.
Prolonged budget debates can cost states money in multiple ways, such as damaging credit ratings and cutting into daily revenue collections.
In New Jersey three years ago, the lack of a budget by July 1 prompted the state to put workers on an immediate furlough, triggering a three-day shutdown of the Atlantic City casinos (for lack of state inspectors) that cost the state more than $1 million a day in lost gambling taxes.
Whenever tax revenues miss the mark - either plunging in recessions or rising in unexpected booms, as happened in the late 1990s - a half-dozen to a dozen states fail to meet July 1 budget deadlines. It’s a credit to Massachusetts that it avoided that status this year, said Ian Pulsipher, a policy specialist with the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“It’s important to note that states are operating under extremely difficult circumstances,’’ Pulsipher said.
DeLeo, a veteran of budget negotiations, said he usually tries to keep his personal calendar clear until August, in case the budget runs over.
But with the budget done by last weekend, DeLeo said he went to a wedding, where an out-of-town guest approached and began enumerating the problems in New York.
“He said, ‘I don’t know you, but I have to congratulate you,’ ’’ DeLeo said proudly yesterday. “ ‘You folks seem like you have your act together.’ ’’
