Fitzsimon File, Your Soapbox

While discretionary funds, the upcoming lottery vote, and the battle over land between the Governor and the Speaker of the House have been dominating the headlines about the General Assembly, the budget process continues in sparsely attended subcommittee meetings held twice a day in the Legislative Office Building.

A handful of lawmakers from the House and Senate on the Health and Human Services subcommittee listen to explanations of programs that help hundreds of thousands of people across the state with health care or housing or transportation, people probably not too concerned with whether some building in downtown Charlotte is sold or given away by the state.

The discussion starts with the assumption that most of the programs need less money, that the point is to find places to make budget cuts to meet the committee’s target of $225 million less than the budget proposed by Governor Mike Easley. Easley’s budget under funded most human service programs and completely ignored others.

But that is the essence of the budget culture these days, that programs need to be cut, and the questions from lawmakers reflect that priority. One senator wanted to know how counties that decided to design their own public assistance programs were doing, how successful they were, with success defined as how much money they saved, not how many families they have helped lift themselves out of poverty, or are helping now.

Unless things change pretty soon, human service programs will suffer again from this year’s budget shortfall, long waiting lists will remain or even grow, families desperate for an affordable place to live will stay desperate or even lose the place they have now.

It is not any particular legislator’s fault. They operate in a largely dysfunctional system, where budget targets are set before lawmakers have any idea about the needs of the state and the people struggling to make ends meet.

Occasionally lawmakers hear about problems, the dropout rate, the dramatic shortage of school nurses, the problems communities have providing mental health services. But they rarely hear solutions, and even less often hear about ways to address the problems. Forget about anything resembling a long range plan.

The push is to cut the budget enough now to keep legislators at least a little insulated from the venom of the no-new-tax-pledge crowd and to not offend the corporate lobbying interests that fund the campaigns.

The joint meetings of the House and Senate budget subcommittees will end in a couple of weeks and the Senate will begin to put its budget together, reportedly in an effort to send its plan to the House by April, a deadline virtually no one believes is realistic.

So leaders could still emerge who think first of the people who need help, about what kind of state we want to be, instead of how many budget cuts to make. There is still time. But not much.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File, Your Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.