GOP Senators Release Their Proposed State Budget

Republican state senators have finally unveiled a counter-proposal to Governor Phil Bredesen’s recommended budget.

The governor had laid out a budget for next year that includes a new tax on cable television companies, increased fees for driver’s licenses, and collecting more sales tax on big ticket items.

The new Republican proposal kills all those taxes.

It also removes a three percent bonus for state employees and takes money that was intended to go for parks and conservation.

But when Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris summed up the new plan, it sounded more like a first offer in a negotiation.

“The extent to which that entire presentation needs to be adopted, remains to be seen.”

State House members have been waiting to see what the Senate would propose. Legislators say they expect to spend about two weeks working it all out.

The new budget proposal was expected to be on the agenda of the Senate Finance Committee Wednesday morning.

Meanwhile, Governor Phil Bredesen said parts the state senate’s first budget proposal were “unpleasant.”

“I don’t think they did anything crazy or illegitimate. I really wish they had visited a little more fully something like the driver’s license fee.”

Bredesen’s proposal would’ve increased the fee to renew a driver’s license by just under $2 a year.

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The new Senate proposal was laid out on two sides of a sheet of paper. It isn’t in a form to be added to the appropriations bill – that step is expected to take place when the Senate Finance Committee meets on the bill.

Members were hoping to get the bill to the Senate floor early next week. Senate Democratic Leader Jim Kyle expressed impatience Tuesday afternoon.

“This has been purported to me to be a consensus of a majority of the Senate…a majority of this committee and a majority of the Senate. If that is indeed the case, we need to move the proposal along.”

Other Senators weren’t as ready to act on the measure. Speaker pro tem Jamie Woodson, a Republican from Knoxville, said she had only had seven minutes to look at the proposal.

“And there’s a wise man who says, on occasion, sometimes when we go slower, we get there faster.
So I’m not sure that I feel compelled to “hustle up” and within a 24-hour period, make a series of significant decisions in haste.”

Norris says the new plan is a “work product” of the Republican Caucus. He says the caucus might equally want to return to a budget more like the one Bredesen had forecast last year – with more one-time money used than Bredesen’s latest proposal, but no new taxes.

“It’s just a question of whether we need to use this, or where it fits in, which template … use for an overlay.”

The biggest difference between the two plans – unless you’re a state employee looking at another year without a raise – is how they use one-time money to balance the budget.

Bredesen’s plan of Spring 2010, which includes the big-ticket-item tax, would bring in more revenue. It would reduce the use of one-time money (like paying the electric bill from your savings account) to less than $100 million.

The Republican plan uses more one-time money – reserves and other sources, like canceling un-issued bonds to free up debt service accounts – to balance the budget.

Critics of the Senate Republican plan, including many House members, say the new GOP proposal will leave the incoming governor in 2011 with a budget that will have to be cut, since the state won’t have the one-time money next year to pay the bills.

Norris says, however, that the new Republican plan doesn’t rely on any more one-time money than the plan originally forecast by Bredesen back in 2009. Then the governor laid out a four-year path to get the state back to a state where it wouldn’t have to rely on one-time money.

He says the governor’s forecast last year was for a budget that would have to fill about $200 million in expenses with one-time funds.

Norris says a key factor will be how willing Democrats are to return to the original, last-year plan from Bredesen.

“It’s a fluid situation, and the game that I think the Democratic leadership in the Senate tries to play is, you know, to quickly paint you in corners, in absolutes, all or nothing, you know, let’s vote it up, let’s vote it down. Because… there’s a lot of ugly in this, on both sides.”

House Democratic Leader Mike Turner of Nashville says the House will look at the new budget with an open mind.

“We told them we would not say anything’s dead in the water, and we’d look at anything they did, and we told them we’d do that, when they present it, and that’s what we’re gonna do.”

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