Without a doubt the most important duty state lawmakers have is to ride herd on the state budget with oodles of your money in play...$83 billion oodles in fact.
With 148 legislators in the house and senate, not everyone has a direct hands-on assignment under the heading, “too many cooks could ruin the sauce.” The heavy lifting, instead, goes to the 19 senators and 29 house members who reside on the appropriations committees.
To be sure the rest of the lawmakers have input on what their districts need or want but at the end of the day the budget folks wield the most power on where your tax dollars go.
Once they finish their work, the budget proposals head to the house floor where everybody else reads the budget before they vote on it.
Well not quite.
For the most part lawmakers “trust” their budget colleagues and sure they take a peek at whether their wishes were fulfi lled but at the end of the day, they pretty much go along with what the hallowed group of 48 lawmakers decided.
But in recent years, some changes have been made to the process that may cause you to gasp or maybe just scratch your head and wonder, “is this anyway to adopted a huge budget.”
First, instead of voting on the budget for each state department, every agency is lumped into one so-called Omnibus bill and all of the billions of dollars for schools are plopped into another Omnibus bill. And with two votes, the budget is adopted without a heck of a lot of debate or in-depth review.
Secondly, even if lawmakers want to paw through the two thousand plus paged document, more often than not, the budget bills emerge in the dead of night and weary and tired lawmakers are told to vote now.
Oh yeah, there is another tradition that raises some eyebrows in the good-government crowd.
When all the members of the house and senate have a disagreement on where money should go, those inter-house differences are sent to a conference committee made-up an even smaller handful of legislators. They have the power to add new items to the budget that never got a full vote in either body. Which means these bi-partisan conferees are like a mini-legislature with more power than anyone else.
At this juncture you might be thinking some reforms are warranted to add more accountability, the old favorite transparency, and sunshine on this important fiduciary duty.
Oakland County GOP senator Jim Runestad thinks so too. He’s trying to round up more colleagues to jump on his White Horse to “reform” some of these practices all in the name of protecting your tax dollars from budgetary tomfoolery.
A recent survey he took reveals that 68 out of 148 legislators want a mandatory 72-hour cooling off period before anyone votes on any budget rather than the current “do it now and be quiet” game plan.
Sixty-four percent want to wipe out that “mini-legislature” provision and 51% think each budget should be reviewed department by department thus driving the Omnibus to the junk heap.
And when it comes to the $429 million in “pork” projects in lawmaker’s home towns, the names of each “porker” would be attached to each special project spending when the proposal is introduced. Now the names are revealed long after the pork has turned to bacon and spent.
The senator thinks both political parties are part of this “corrupt” budget system and should join his effort to un-corrupt it.
Everyone in the legislature in favor say “aye.”
Louder.
