Time grows short for budget

When state legislators get back next week from their unearned spring break to work ostensibly toward an unlikely adjournment April 7, they might be presented with something important that they’ve been flying thus far without.

Good sense.

Just kidding. Somewhat.

I refer to something committed to paper in the way of a budget outline for the next fiscal year beginning July 1.

As was required in November, then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson presented a proposed balanced budget for the coming fiscal year. But he’s gone now, his legacy ragged. Some days it’s almost as if he never existed.

It happens from time to time that an outgoing term-limited governor presents a budget that won’t be his to live with.

In those cases, the incoming successor—Hutchinson in the case of Mike Beebe, and Beebe in the case of Mike Huckabee—looks at that budget and lets the Legislature know either that he more or less can live with it, perhaps making a few adjustments in the margins in a timely fashion, or needs to make some wholesale changes.

Hutchinson didn’t change Beebe’s much. Beebe substantially changed Huckabee’s because he was committed to phasing out the sales tax on groceries and he inherited a billion-dollar surplus, half of which he needed to spend on new public school facilities under a court order in the Lake View case.

Now—just to complete that saga— Huckabee’s daughter, Sarah Sanders, is governor and gearing up to pay parents for their kids to abandon those facilities for private, parochial and home schools. And she’s rammed through the authorization bill for that without any official update in the now-moot balanced budget that Hutchinson presented in November.

This time, under the thumb of this new governor last seen granting an interview to out-of-state right-wing media, things are … irregular.

That mostly has to do with this omnibus law mandating big bucks for raising minimum teacher pay and implementing phase one of school vouchers. And there will be some new short-term costs in criminal justice while we await longer-term and bigger costs when we get built a giant new prison and do away with parole for serious felons.

Also, we apparently still will draw down the state income tax—by some undeclared means and unknown timetable.

Some of the more veteran and responsible legislators who concern themselves with budgeting—there are three or four, anyway—have asked the administration for weeks for at least a new budget outline from the executive. It’s not clear why they haven’t gotten it. The governor herself wouldn’t do it anyway; she has numbers people for that. There are holdovers over at the Department of Finance and Administration who can cipher.

Whatever the reason, state Sen. Jonathan Dismang, co-chairman of the Joint Budget Committee and generally one of the knowledgeable and responsible ones (his vote for the school bill notwithstanding), got quoted the other day saying he would spend the spring break putting numbers to paper.

That presumably would amount at least to an outline of a balanced budget.

He later clarified to me that he didn’t mean he’d personally write a multibillion-dollar budget. He said he was engaging with other members and officials and was not meaning to dictate, but to push things vitally along.

Am I accusing Sanders of abdicating her responsibility? I hope not. I’m hard enough on her. And there’s a precedent for this situation. It’s not ironic. It’s coincidental.

Her dad ascended mid-year to the governorship upon Jim Guy Tucker’s troubles in the 1990s. The next January, Huckabee wasn’t ready with a budget and let legislators write it. They were led by, well … Beebe, who was in the state Senate at the time.

In his defense, Huckabee was dealing with a big Democratic legislative majority. His daughter, by contrast, has everything her way.

Again, I’m not criticizing her. That gets tiresome. I’m just saying.

Meantime, on budget specifics, I’m advised to stop suggesting that large new operational costs at the prison will be a major problem in this immediate budget. Those will come in what you call “out years,” when the new prison gets built and population starts growing under the expected tough new law keeping serious future felons in prison for their entire sentences.

I’m also hearing that, yes, the budget will include some decimal-point reduction in the current 4.9 percent top income-tax rate. The thinking is that we should get that done now before bills come due in future years on these school vouchers and larger prison populations.

And everything about the immediate budget hinges on the assumption that the Legislature will continue to reach the three-fourths majority to keep Medicaid expanded and generate those vital federal matching dollars.

All of that is to say it’s about time to quit giggling about kicking around teachers, librarians and transgender persons, and turn to government work.