Governor did the right, tough thing vetoing HB 12

In four terms in the Montana legislature few decisions have been as difficult as whether or not to uphold Gov. Steve Bullock’s veto on House Bill 12. It passed with bipartisan majorities in both chambers. It appears to be a bill every Democrat, including the governor, would want to support. It increases funding to health care providers who serve the most vulnerable, many on Medicaid. Funding for increases to these providers was cut in 2010 as we struggled with the economic devastation of the Great Recession. Many programs took hits then, including university budgets, with students paying higher tuition, the Big Sky RX program was capped, leaving many seniors without much-needed assistance for expensive prescriptions, child protection services and tribal college assistance programs were also cut back or increases rescinded (which is what happened to the health care providers then too).

So why did the governor veto HB 12, and why am I upholding that veto? HB 12 is the only bill that backfills any of the funding lost in 2010 in aftermath of the recession. We didn’t pass a bill to backfill university tuition, tribal college assistance, child protection services, senior prescriptions and so on. All are worthy.

Every bill that reduces revenue by spending or tax cutting goes through tremendous legislative scrutiny both for its policy content and budget impact. It must pass House appropriations and Senate finance committees, and it must pass both chambers. After all of that, the governor gets a final look — and in this case it was his judgment that paying for all the bills passed put us too close to budgetary structural imbalance, that is, where we literally take in less than we spend by $21 million — about a fourth of it in HB 12.

Second, there is already increased funding in the budget bill, HB 2, for direct care workers, Medicaid providers, and people with developmental disabilities — $65 million. That includes a 2 percent increase in provider reimbursement each year of the biennium. It’s overdue. It’s a little less than state employees received (although some of them will get no raise at all) and they do some of the most challenging work for some of the lowest wages in the state. HB 2 increases provider reimbursement rates for the first time in 4 years.

Which raises a third issue: nothing in HB 12 guarantees that the money will be used to increase employee wages, increase employee benefits, hire more employees or provide more services. It backfills cuts to increases from the 2010 budget. I understand why providers want the money they thought was coming their way, and I know that many get by only because of the generosity of local donors in their own communities. They do work that matters. But while some might use the funding to improve employee wages and benefits, those are permanent commitments and this is one-time-only funding. The governor might have offered an amendatory veto to HB 12 or any of the over 200 bills that came to his desk when it was too late to amend them and send them back to the legislature for approval. But the Republican legislative leadership didn’t give him that opportunity because they held up or held on to too many bills until the last days of the session, foreclosing on the governor the option of offering amendments. So he had two choices — thumbs up or down. At the time HB 12 came to him, he was looking at a structural imbalance in the budget, a bill that backfilled cuts for only one program over all the others that took hits during the recession, and beneficiaries who were already included in the budget increases in HB 2.

The governor might have thought “I’d be a lot more popular if I didn’t veto this bill.” But he did the tough thing. You might hear different things about how much we have to spend, but we work with two figures. One is the actual money in the bank now minus the actual money going out in expenditures now. That’s what the governor determined was at risk. The other is the money we expect to have in the bank at the end of two years. That’s a higher figure right now and some legislators argue for spending the higher figure — but two years is a long time. Try budgeting your expected income for your expected expense for two years. I know the governor didn’t do the easy thing, and I know supporting his decision was not easy either. But he did the right thing.

(State Rep. Franke Wilmer, a Democrat from Bozeman, represents the 63rd district.)