From Deseret News archives:
Budget battles brewing
After a Senate GOP caucus Wednesday, Senate President John Valentine, R-Orem, told members of the Executive Appropriations Committee that GOP senators wanted to talk more about the year-old base-budget adoption process.
After Valentine's talk, a legislative source said that some GOP senators were worried that fiscally conservative House members may use the base-budget process to politically blackmail the upper body's majority.
"That is a legitimate concern," Valentine told the Deseret Morning News.
Despite the concerns raised by Valentine at the committee meeting, legislative leaders approved almost half of their budget more than a month before the general session begins, just as they have done the past two years.
The $4.4 billion base budget tentatively approved equals the amount of money appropriated to state agencies and public education in last year's budget, although it does not include outside funding sources such as federal funds or dedicated credits.
The base budget also includes $132 million in new money, mostly to account for inflationary growth in Medicaid and public education.
The base-budget process was used last year as a way of actually blackmailing Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. into adopting a more austere new spending plan that included bigger tax cuts than the $60 million the governor wanted then.
The thinking was that if Huntsman refused to negotiate, then GOP legislators could just walk out at the end of the session without worrying about a basic spending plan because the base budget was adopted early in the session.
That tactic didn't work last year, even though the governor and legislative leaders worked out a budget compromise in the final days of the session. Just before the session ended, the House failed to pass a major component of that compromise.
The governor's office downplayed the incident. "Despite some disagreements, in the end we have always managed to come together and adopt a budget for the good of the residents of Utah," Huntsman's spokesman, Mike Mower, said.
Now, Huntsman's new $10.7 billion budget for 2007-08 appears to look pretty good to GOP senators, with a $100 million tax cut. House Republicans, however, say they have enough votes to pass a $300 million tax cut.
