The Shumlin administration Monday outlined a plan to trim more than $30 million from this year’s state budget. And while officials say they’ve worked hard to minimize the impact on vulnerable Vermonters, advocates are poised to lobby against cuts they say could hurt the state’s neediest.
Reducing the state budget by 2 percent is never an easy task. And Administration Secretary Jeb Spaulding said cuts, coming in the wake of an unexpected revenue downgrade, won’t be without consequence.
“Many Vermonters, lots of Vermonters that rely on programs and services will be impacted by this, and we regret that,” Spaulding told the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee Monday afternoon.
But Spaulding says the administration’s proposal keeps the government safety net fully intact.
“I hope you will agree when we’re done that although we’d rather not be doing these things at all, that we can accomplish the savings while preserving core programs and services,” Spaulding said.
The proposed reductions have been spread across scores of departments and divisions, a strategy aimed at minimizing the impact on any single area. Finance Commissioner Jim Reardon said the administration looked first to areas of the budget that had been given recent increases. That means state colleges will see the 1-percent funding increase approved last May rescinded, if the administration’s plan is approved by lawmakers. And medical providers serving the state’s lowest-income patients would see recently approved increases in their reimbursement rates go by the wayside. Those reimbursements would have totaled about $6 million in fiscal year 2015 altogether.
“So it affects all the Medicaid providers, Designated Agencies, hospitals, home health agencies,” Reardon said.
More controversial are the reductions to line items such as the Community Rehabilitation and Treatment Program, and cuts to grants for at-risk teenagers served by the “Youth in Transition” program. Reductions to those two programs total about $900,000.
“These are where there’s some pain,” Reardon said.
Human services advocates will weigh in on the proposed changes at a public hearing Tuesday afternoon in Montpelier. But the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee looks poised to take quick action on the plan, and a vote on the budget reduction package is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday.
Senate President John Campbell is a member of the Joint Fiscal Committee, and says the administration gave lawmakers a preview of the plan over the weekend. Campbell says that when the gloomier-than-expected revenue forecast arrived late last month, he was worried about what it would mean for the budget.
“I was concerned that these cuts, in order for us to reach that $32 million, were going to have to be not only deep, but also painful,” Campbell said. “Fortunately they have not. In fact, I’m very impressed with what the administration has done.”
Other reductions include a $280,000 cut to a Working Lands program that delivers cash grants to start-up agriculture ventures that need help with capital expenditures.
The administration plans to solve some of the budget problem by not filling openings in various departments, including the Department of Public Safety, which will leave vacant seven state trooper positions. The Department of Buildings and General Services will accomplish some of its budget reductions by eliminating unneeded overtime hours. News of that reduction prompted a question from Campbell, who asked by the department wouldn’t have done that anyway.
“I’m not surprised to hear that question, because I had the same question myself – what the hell are you doing when we don’t have a problem?” Reardon said.
Reardon said a government-wide attempt to dial back on unnecessary overtime expenses is underway.
Much of the rescission package relies on projections for decreased need for certain government services. For instance, the Department for Children and Families says that, based on new projections, it will spend more than $2 million less on a welfare program known as Reach Up than it had anticipated it would need as recently as May. And the number of families in need of child care, according to Reardon, is also expected to decline, something he says will allow the state to reduce funding by $1.3 million without any impact on services.
Lawmakers are still sorting out what exactly the cuts might mean for programs they care about most. Reardon characterized hundreds of thousands of dollars in reductions to the Department of Corrections as being impact-free – the result of delayed timetables for projects that had originally been scheduled to begin during this coming fiscal year.
But Bennington Sen. Dick Sears, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Committee on Corrections, said he’d heard from some corrections officials that the delays were prompted by the reductions, and not the other way around.
Gov. Peter Shumlin and his chief of staff, Liz Miller, and Lt. Gov. Phil Scott are each forgoing cost-of-living adjustments to their government salaries to help in the rescission effort. Combined, that will save taxpayers about $7,500 in fiscal year 2015.
The public hearing begins at 3:45 p.m. Tuesday in the Statehouse.
