Budget talks stall, restart
May 20th, 2010
OKLAHOMA CITY – Legislative leaders and Gov. Brad Henry continued closed-door negotiations Wednesday as they tried to develop a plan to bridge the state’s $1.2 billion budget gap.
But despite almost around-the-clock negotiations – and with only eight days remaining in the 2010 legislative session – leaders of the Republican-controlled House and Senate have yet to release details of the FY 2011 budget. The 2011 fiscal year begins July 1.
Those negotiations hit the skids after a disagreement this week between Senate Pro Tempore Glenn Coffee, an Oklahoma City Republican, and Henry, a Democrat.
“Tuesday night budget negotiations were pretty much at an impasse,” said Senate Democratic Leader Charlie Laster of Shawnee.
Laster said the disagreement was over education funding.
“I think it was about education,” he said. “But since then it seems things have moved forward. I think the impasse is over.”
By Wednesday afternoon legislative leaders and the governor were talking again.
“I think they are getting a little closer,” Laster said.
For weeks now, Democratic lawmakers have pushed Republican leaders for details about the FY 2011 budget, complaining the Democrats have been left out of the negotiations. That argument came to a head during floor action in the Senate on Wednesday.
During debate over Senate Bill 1590, a measure that would put a moratorium on $23.4 million worth of rural tax credits, Democrats peppered state Sen. Mike Mazzei, a Tulsa Republican, with questions for more than an hour. And, at times, those questions turned tense.
“Your vote today will indicate whether or not you are willing to stand behind some corporate special interests rather than the people of Oklahoma,” Mazzei said.
State Sen. Kenneth Corn, D-Poteau, countered that Mazzei and the Senate’s Republican leadership was trying to balance the budget on the backs of rural residents.
“We are all Oklahomans,” Corn said. “Don’t segment us. We are all Oklahomans.”
For weeks, legislators have struggled to write the FY 2011 budget.
At the beginning of the legislative session, Henry called for more than $64 million in targeted spending cuts and savings, $257 million in cash transfers and $203 million in revenue enhancements in his executive budget.
Earlier this week lobbyists with the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association proposed a voluntary rollback of a gross production tax credit valued at $100 million to help balance the budget.
That idea, legislative leaders said, was being seriously considered.
“We’re studying their offer right now,” Coffee said. “It’s an interesting proposal and it has a great deal of merit.”
But while the oil industry’s proposal was being closely examined, the governor’s budget plan and the Democrats’ call for a provider fee (a fee paid by state hospitals to generate federal Medicaid funds) were greeted with much more skepticism by Republicans.
“It’s (the provider fee) not the focus,” Coffee said. “The focus is trying to identify a level of spending and how to pay for it.”
Earlier this month, Democrats sent a letter to Coffee calling for changes in the budget, including the provider fee. Democrats also threatened to withhold votes on emergency clauses if those changes weren’t included.
Coffee said that threat could derail the budget process.
“I think the legislative Democrats have threatened the process,” Coffee said. “We want to find out where they are at. That’s all there is to it.”
On Wednesday, Democrats made good on their threat.
Voting along party lines, Senate Bill 1590 passed 26-22, but the measure’s emergency clause – which allows the bill to go into effect immediately, instead of after a 90-day wait – failed by the same vote.
That vote, state Sen. Jay Paul Gumm said, was a message for the GOP’s leadership.
“We need to be able to see the whole picture,” Gumm, D-Durant, said. “We all ought to be able to look at the whole picture before we buy the thing and right now we’re not getting to do that.”
Still, lawmakers on both sides said they expected a budget agreement to be finalized before the session’s May 28 deadline – but what that budget looks like continues to be the topic of a great deal of speculation.
“The issue of the budget and generating additional revenue is still a mystery to us,” Laster said. “We don’t know what’s on the table.”
M. Scott Carter, Reporter - The Journal Record (OKC)