Fitzsimon File

The General Assembly session adjourned early Friday morning, not long after midnight, after passing bills to make appointments to state boards and commissions and determine what issues will be studied before the General Assembly reconvenes in January.

The roundups of the session will begin in earnest this weekend in newspapers across the state. More detailed briefings about the session in next week’s Fitzsimon Files, but overall it was if there were two General Assembly sessions this summer, one in which lawmakers passed the budget and generally held open debate with few of the legislative shenanigans that have marked previous sessions.

The second session was much different. While most of the attention was on ethics and lobbying reform after the budget was passed, lawmakers reverted to their familiar and troubling ways, with bills popping up at the last minute and parliamentary maneuvers used to prevent recorded votes and end debate.

The budget process was unusually open with most of the hearings held in public, even the negotiations between the House and Senate over a final spending plan. When the joint meetings broke down and negotiators retired to separate rooms and were sending offers back and forth, the offers were made available to reporters on the scene.

The budget was also generally free of pork barrel projects for legislative leaders and special provisions that had nothing to do with the budget itself, though a tax break for NASCAR did appear in the budget out of nowhere. 

The House debate on lobbying and ethics reform was mostly held early in the session and it was largely open too, with Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Joe Hackney often asking for public input as the Committee wrestled with different proposals. 

That changed later in the session, with the House leaving a lobbying reform bill languishing on the House calendar for 8 days to avoid a vote on amendment to ban lobbyists from raising money and the Senate never asking for public comment about lobbying and ethics as it debated the bills in committee. 

Despite the loss of procedural integrity as the session wore on, this General Assembly will remembered for passing the best budget in recent memory and enacting lobbying and ethics reform that while falling short of the goals set by legislative leaders, is a significant improvement over current law.

Thursday was the battle of the partisan press releases, with House Democrats holding a press conference to claim they kept their promises made at the beginning of the session, when they released their legislative agenda with the focus-group tested title, “The Plan for a Secure Future.”

Senate Minority Leader Phil Berger of course has a different take on the session, saying that Democrats focused on “re-election and damage control” instead of addressing the state real problems.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle and both sides are clearly spinning their positions with an eye towards the November election.

Berger claimed that the $2.4 billion budget surplus was “spent in its entirety,” which is simply not true. The final budget cut taxes, put more than $300 million in the state’s saving account and transferred another $200 million back to the Highway Trust Fund to help with road construction.  But what’s a few hundred million dollars when you are tying to make a political point?

The budget is actually one of the best in recent years, making major investments in education and human services, particularly mental health programs, that have been cut dramatically in recent years. A significant number of Republicans voted for the budget, which ought to make it more difficult for Berger and others to use it as a partisan campaign issue.

The biggest problem with the budget is that it sets up a shortfall for lawmakers next session by a combination of cutting taxes, making needed investments, and using one-time money to pay for recurring needs.  That doesn’t have to mean a retreat on public investment next year, but it will take uncommon political courage to avoid it.

Other items in a relatively long list of accomplishments include an increase in the minimum wage, the innocence commission, a moratorium on new landfills, decent pay raises for teachers and state employees, a ban on video poker and an end to smoking the legislative buildings.  

Next week an analysis of the details of the issues that dominated the session and a look at the winners and losers on Jones Street.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.