Live Blogging: Special Budgetary Session

The Utah Legislature is meeting to cut the state budget, so that expenditures will match declining revenues. Because this affects people and programs that people count on, this is a difficult task. But it is a necessary task. (Also, very unfortunately, in my opinion, we’re also addressing exemptions to high school performance testing requirements.).

I’ll live blog the progress of the session.

September 25, 2008

I met this morning with House Republican leadership at 7 a.m.

At 8 a.m., I met with the Education Interim Committee (audio here), to consider Sen. Stephenson’s Student Achievement Testing Exceptions. Brad Last and I were the only “no” votes. To me, this is not a special session issue. It requires more discussion/consideration in a general session. Because this should be a budgetary session, I won’t clog up this post discussing the bill. I’ll discuss it in the post below.

12:30 p.m. – Legislative leadership has been meeting with the Governor, to set a general pathway for deliberations to proceed. To make up a projected shortfall of $275 million, we’re looking to cut agency budgets 3-4% ($175 million), cut building and road funds ($65 million), cut AR&I on buildings ($15 million), and repeal a health care tax cut that has not yet gone into effect but has been accounted for on the balance sheet ($18 million). A series of internal reallocations and bonding is proposed to get to those final amounts, but that’s where discussions are headed.

Sub-Appropriations Committees are meeting to hear how Department heads propose to address the 3% cuts. I’m in Health and Human Services. (Audio here – look at “What’s Happening Today”). Here is some commentary on the Human Services proposals from the Director.

Listening/absorbing the info makes it very hard to blog. Strikes me that our system would be much better, if handouts from agencies were posted online.

Lunch – caucuses are meeting to see where Reps/Senators are heading.

We'll reconvene sub-approps committees at 2:30.

3:50 p.m. -- We're wound around the stem a bit, but it looks like we are going to adopt the Departments' recommendations. I am arguing that, if committee members vote against adopting those recommendations, that each should explain his/her preferred way of getting to the 3% (which is the task at hand) -- and, after so doing, having the opportunity to more globally address how the overall budget should be addressed.

4:00 p.m. -- We did adopt the Departments' recommended cuts, but we're really struggling to get our arms around the data in such a short time. The HHS budgets are some of the more complex budgets, because of all the various programs. We're now looking for one-time cuts of 3%. We look at money in terms of on-going (planned to be repeated every year, unless changed) and one-time (once spent, it will be gone).

I have a House Republican leadership meeting, and after that a joint Republican leadership meeting with the Senate. We'll see where the HHS committee lands, but I think we need another meeting, to give members and the Departments a night to digest what we've done and come up with a few more ideas.

UPDATE (9/29/08): Rep. Holdaway posts his thoughts on the special session.