No backroom deals in state budget

By CHARLES M. ARLINGHAUS

Governments and budgets are about elected officials making choices on behalf of the people who elect them. The current budget is as difficult and as controversial as any in recent history. This year, with so many decisions yet to be made and even the House regarding its own product as half-finished, an open debate must not be sacrificed to backroom deals and sudden, undebated policy changes.

Both the governor and, particularly, the House have made significant steps in the direction of open government and transparency. In the Senate, the process often becomes murkier.

The governor's budget submission is usually the most transparent and easiest to understand. By law, he is required to include summary charts and other material, which take the form of a 40-page executive summary. Although written as a public relations document, the summary helps make most major changes readily apparent and is the foundation of early budget debate.

This year, the actual budget document was made easier to read and more transparent, resulting in a roughly 2,000-page document, nearly double its previous length. The most compelling change was the addition of job totals for each program and category of the budget. Unfortunately, the House budget removed this information and reduced the budget by about 1,000 pages. It takes up less space, but at the expense of important information.

Nonetheless, the House made great strides in its transparency efforts. It is easier to be critical (or supportive, I suppose) of the things the House did because the budget is easier to access and understand. In the past, the House budget came without any of the explanatory materials the governor's budget included.

This year, Rep. Marjorie Smith and the Finance Committee she chairs put together a document similar to the governor's executive summary. While it helps make the case for the committee's changes, it also enables people who disagree with those decisions to explain what they see wrong with the budget. In short, it leads to debate, which is the basis of representative government. I hope that in the future the budget law will be changed to make this good idea a requirement.

Now comes the hard part. As the Senate takes over and a deadline to finish looms, all too often open government is sacrificed to backroom deals.

The budget is often finished at the last minute without any time for the bulk of the Senate to examine it in detail. Just two years ago, I debated a thoughtful senator about the budget. She hoped the details I cited were wrong (they weren't), but she hadn't been able to look at the details and had trusted Senator So-and-so to provide her with information. In the end, people of both parties had to trust their own inside sources because of the rush and lack of information.

The final Senate version and also the final committee of conference compromise should include a summary much like the governor and the House included and three full days at a minimum to examine it before a vote. This is not some radical conservative idea. It is what President Obama has pledged to work toward.

Second, the final product should not include new taxes or new programs that have not been part of the debate before. Each new tax, for example, should have been discussed and vetted before inclusion in the final budget. In the House side, after complaints that new taxes didn't have a full hearing in committee, amendments allowed separate debates on each of six separate taxes. There should be no last minute surprises.

Third, one of the oldest tricks in the legislative arsenal is to "solve problems" at the end by merely adjusting revenue estimates. We can't agree on another $10 million to cut, so we merely say that upon reconsideration, we think taxes will rise by an amount that is higher by a very convenient number.

By next week, we will have 10 of 12 months of the current fiscal year in hand, including the most important months for almost every tax. There is no information that will come to light over the next six weeks to significantly change the estimates of how much we might raise. Once a revenue number is set, it should be locked into place to avoid accusations of gamesmanship in the process.

The final budget will cause much debate over choices that are made, but we can ensure that each of those choices is transparent and open to debate so our government is held accountable.

Charles M. Arlinghaus is president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in Concord.