Frustration level escalates in talks over state budget
http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=004a11d6-afb7-41d4-ac42-3e8fcfbef0aa
By Ted Mann
Published on 5/22/2009
Hartford - Emerging from yet another inconclusive budget meeting in the office of Gov. M. Jodi Rell, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the legislature assembled shoulder-to-shoulder, exuding the barely-restrained tension of a quarreling couple trying to keep it clean in front of the kids.
It didn’t last long.
The frustrations of a long spring of disagreement on the state’s budget woes spilled out as Senate President Donald E. Williams Jr., D-Brooklyn, and House Speaker Christopher Donovan, D-Meriden, briefed reporters on their meeting, with the minority leaders, Sen. John McKinney, R-Fairfield, and Rep. Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, standing uncomfortably at their side.
”There was frustration expressed in the room on both sides,” said Cafero, looking frustrated. “To ask the differences, they’re ideological differences, of course. What are the solutions? Cutting and taxation. And that’s the battle that’s going to wage in those rooms.”
The leaders were attempting a traditional show of cooperation, but under questioning from reporters, the cooperative spirit faded.
Williams and Donovan offered a gentle if now familiar critique of Rell’s negotiating position, saying the governor had declined to provide a list of new proposed budget cuts to help close the state’s projected two-year budget deficit of more than $8 billion.
”We thought we would get a list of cuts,” Donovan said. “She has admitted that she would not give us a list, but she would do it as (negotiators go) department by department” through the budget.
Next to him, Cafero occasionally glanced heavenward while McKinney seemed unable to stand still, frequently jumping to the microphones to assert that both Rell and legislative Republicans have proposed numerous budget cuts that were ignored by Democrats, and seeking to rebut what they have increasingly seen as an effort to scapegoat Rell by the Democrats.
”It was always the governor’s intent to give those cuts in the context of the budget negotiations as they go through line by line and department by department,” Cafero said of the long awaited cuts list, which Democrats have insisted Rell must produce if she is genuine about her desire to pass a budget before the fiscal year ends June 30.
By the accounts of some familiar with the leaders’ private discussion, it was even more tense on the inside of the governor’s office, a fact Donovan confirmed at the outset.
The lawmakers “certainly had some frank exchange of opinions, very spirited at times,” the speaker said. “But the general feeling is that still we’re committed to trying to work this out. We have new instructions for our chairs and ranking members who are working with OPM to try and work things out.”
That assessment, largely echoed by the governor as she departed her office moments later, summed up the current dilemma of the budget debate: After months of jousting in the press, the Democrats still accuse Rell of failing to fully confront the depths of the state’s budget crisis and of trying to run out the clock on the legislative session to increase pressure on the legislature to make a deal.
And Rell and the Republicans say the Democrats have only themselves to blame, having crafted a budget bill, complete with more than $3 billion in tax increases, that their own large caucuses in the House and Senate don’t want to debate, much less vote for, without cover from the state’s chief executive.
Some lawmakers accuse the governor’s staff of dragging their feet, while administration officials scoff at the suggestion that lawmakers need the governor in order to pass a budget bill.
”Since when?” one administration official said Thursday, suggesting that the biggest problem for Democrats was that they have yet to draft a budget bill that would even win enough support to pass, let alone withstand a veto.
As the legislative leaders scattered to their respective offices, and reporters waited outside the office for Rell to appear, Robert L. Genuario, a former Republican senator and now the governor’s budget chief, emerged from a side door, bearing a large armload of folders and papers, and headed up the stairs toward his staff’s offices in the Capitol.
”There’s no question we have a lot of work to do, and we are still a long way apart,” Genuario said. “My experience in these things is that eventually you break through a hurdle and things happen very quickly. We haven’t broken through that hurdle yet.”
Rell added, in so many words, they would keep trying.
”Let’s work, let’s push this process along, let’s ask our folks to work a little harder, a little faster, and then hopefully get something that we can then work with,” Rell said, “(and then) decide how we proceed from there.”
The legislature’s regular session ends June 3.
t.mann@theday.com
