MPBN: LePage's Budget Cutting Plan Targets Education, Social Service Programs

By AJ Higgins

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Last spring, a legislative committee approved a plan requiring Gov. Paul LePage to identify nearly $34 million in spending reductions to keep state finances balanced. The administration delivered its findings to the Appropriations Committee today, calling for more than $20 million in cuts to education and Health and Human Services programs alone. Majority Democrats are balking at the proposal, and say that lawmakers will develop their own plan. But Republicans say it will be hard to find cuts that won’t impact the state’s two largest departments. A.J. Higgins reports.

Richard Rosen (left), a former GOP lawmaker from Bucksport, was tapped by LePage to head the governor’s Office of Policy and Management that presented the plan to the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee. Democratic state Sen. Emily Cain of Orono says she expected the governor’s office to make some tough choices. But she didn’t expect LePage to achieve $20 million dollars’ worth of those reductions – or nearly two-thirds of the designated total – by targeting programs that help students and children.

“There’s no question that if the governor could have his way with the proposals in this report, that students and communities and families would be in harm’s way,” Cain says.

Cain, an Appropriations Committee member, says she and other lawmakers will have a chance to reshape much of the governor’s plan under a provision of state budget law that granted LePage the power to make a little more than $11 million in cuts through a financial order. 

She says that while those will likely remain unchanged, the additional $22 million in proposed spending reductions will have to be reviewed by the Appropriations Committee. Cain is particularly critical of LePage’s plans for reducing General Purpose Aid for local school districts by a little more than $9 million, and cuts of nearly $11 million to state Health and Human Services programs. Those include a $500,000 reduction to the state’s Head Start program for children up to five years of age from low-income families.

“Most of this report is a ‘greatest hits’ of the LePage administration’s budget proposals that had been rejected, and rejected again, by the Legislature,” Cain says.

The proposed education cuts are consistent with the governor’s allegations of overspending by local districts on school administrative costs. But Connie Brown, executive director of the Maine School Management Association and Maine School Boards Association, says the governor’s proposal would present a burden on local taxpayers whose school districts are just beginning to recover from earlier LePage cuts.

“General Purpose Aid had just returned to pre-curtailment levels with the passage of the biennial budget, and school districts are now counting on those revenues to get back some of the programs they had lost,” Brown says, “and this is a real erosion of those funds.”

Republicans, such as GOP House Leader Ken Fredette, say it’s difficult to imagine that the administration could have achieved its reduction targets without significantly impacting the state’s two largest cost centers: the state Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education that channels about a billion dollars a year back to Maine schools.

And Rep. Kathleen Chase, a Wells Republican on the panel, said Rosen’s office had done a good job targeting programs, such as Head Start, that are at the center of spending overlaps by multiple agencies.

“If nothing else, my hope is that by going through this process and looking at what’s being proposed here, that we’ll have a better idea of what the big picture is,” Chase says.

Members of the Appropriations Committee are expected to begin work on the reduction plan in January, when the public will have an opportunity to weigh in on the spending cuts.