Tuesday Q&A — part 1 on the budget

For today’s Q&A, I talked to Rep. Gary Alexander. I’m also working on an interview with Sen. Ed Murray, but I’ve had no luck scheduling it yet.

So, here you’ll find Alexander’s thoughts on the budget.

Q: First, tell me where you’re at in the process now. Last week, Senate majority Leader Lisa Brown said they’re coming out with a Senate version of early action cuts. Is the House involved in that? Are Republicans involved in the budget process more than in previous years?

Alexander: We haven’t been involved with that on this side. We started out with a process that I’d hoped would be continued when we met in late November and early December as five corners. We have budget representatives from both the Democrats in the Senate, Republicans and we had the House Democrats and myself from House Republicans and the governor’s office. We met in a five-corner session to take a look at early action changes we could make in the budget to help address our $1.2 billion shortfall for this biennium.

I thought that was very successful. There was give and take, we negotiated, came to consensus, had a one-day session and passed an early action bill. But once the session has started, unfortunately that has gone adrift and we seem to be back in our respective corners.

From my perspective, I was still willing to negotiate and come together. To do so, two things had to happen – one is that all 52 cards were on the table and they weren’t. So certain cards were removed before we even started to negotiate. It had to be an open process.

Second, we needed to talk about not only the balance of this biennium s shortfall but we need to start down the path toward resolving the issue we face in 11-13. So as it turned out those two issues weren’t addressed in the second early action proposal. So we pretty much passed a second early action bill.

Q: You proposed an alternative to the House budget that would have made fewer cuts to education and more cuts to social services. Since more cuts are needed, do you think both will end up happening?

Alexander: Yes. I think that both need to happen. The issues for us were twofold. One, the cuts that were made to education were retroactive and from my standpoint I didn’t feel that it was fair nor did my caucus, to reach back and ask our schools to make cuts in programs that they’ve already had obligations to and probably money already spent. That was one of the issues we had with the House D version of the budget.

Second, we felt it was too reliant on cutting education. Part of the solution was to suspend payment for special need population and put it in next biennium.

And then significant reductions that need to take place in human services such as GAU/Disability Lifeline – the governor proposed making those early actions and I felt that it was an appropriate decision.

Disability Lifeline, GA-U and the children’s program for non-documented children – those are $500 million in a biennium, which we thought were significant. To take those off the table, to us, was not a responsible solution. I believe they had to be back on the table, along with all-day kindergarten.

Q: Once you make the cuts to this budget cycle, will the carry-forward savings go a long way toward solving the 2011-2013 budget gap?

Alexander: It could go along ways if we started to take action early. But things like the apportionment that the governor’s talking about – taking payment in June and moving into July – into next biennium. That’s just a one time, there’s nothing sustainable about that.

Or transfers – I think probably transfers to some extent have to be on the table but we’re not going to go back and do like we did with the capital budget – move $1 billion over to operating. That’s one time money that’s no sustainable.

We’re looking at trying to make these budget cuts in a way that’s sustainable. We have to reduce the size of the footprint of state government.

We have to make this a smaller state government. Just cutting around the edges and making reductions or suspensions is not the long-term solution. It pretty much just pushes that bow wave forward.

Q: Is there any way to make cuts in the margins at this point? Or is it only possible to cut entire programs?

Alexander: There’s just not that much in the margins. We have to go back and talk about you know how we got here, I guess. From our standpoint, we felt that if the Democrat majority party would have taken early action to make reduction or at least stop increases in 2008 when the revenue was turning, we wouldn’t be in the position of having to cut. But once we put that threshold way up there, you know, we’ve already taken care of the margins in the $5 to $6 billion problem we had two years ago.

I just don’t know how much margin we have left.

We have to look at our paramount responsibility, which is of course education, and debt, pensions — (other than that) everything else has to be on the table. And to me, it has to go back and look at priorities of government. If these things are low, let’s just talk about eliminating them or see if private or non-profit can take over.

Q: You released your own supplemental budget proposal after the bipartisan effort fell apart. Are you working on the 2011-2013 budget with Democrats? Or do you plan to release your own budget again?

Alexander: We’ve been criticized in the past, and I have as the budget leader for the House, for just making, I guess, alternatives in terms of amendments. We’ve offered them in several cases for years in Ways and Means and on the floor to find a way to balance the budget without looking at new tax and fee increases.

So people said, Why don’t you just produce your own budget? And I said, I try to work within the framework. I’d like to see it be bipartisan. This time around I said no, if we can’t come to agreement, we’re going to propose an alternative.

So yes, we put together a complete alternative supplemental. And hopefully, I have said to Rep. Hunter that my hope is that we can work together for a bipartisan solution for 11-13. I’ve been involved with long day and evening meetings to address that with the chair of the Ways and Means committee.

But if we can’t come to some agreement together, then we will indeed proceed down the path of having an alternative budget for 2011-13.

Hopefully we can come to some kind of commonality and a proposal that can be bipartisan. But if it can’t, then I will basically be proposing an alternative budget.

My preference is the governor would call back the five corners because even if we get together as House Democrat and House Republican, we’ve got the Senate, which may be going in a different direction. Why not bring us all to the table and see if we can negotiate a budget solution?

Tags: Alexander, Budget, Tuesday Q&A