Time to End the Bleary-Eyed Budget Vote
Thursday, June 23, 2011
When was the last time you had to sort through and quickly master the subject matter within a several hundred page document that will impact the lives of about a million people and also happens to have a $7.7 billion dollar price tag attached to it?
If you were a member of the Rhode Island General Assembly, it pretty much happens to you every June, and in fact just happened last week.
Whether you agree or disagree with the proposed cuts, spending decisions, public pay or pension changes found within the state budget now approaching final floor votes, if you are a government-engaged citizen, there is one thing you can agree on: the practices governing the end of session state budget review process, and the overall committee hearing processes leading up to final votes, amounts to a process that is deeply flawed and in need of serious reform.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTLast year’s Moderate Party gubernatorial candidate Ken Block laid out this case earlier this week and he is right on the mark.
In fairness, long before the session devolved into last week’s all too predictable Friday evening mad rush presentation of the restructured budget to the House Finance Committee, this year’s session had actually begun on an encouraging high note for greater transparency by the Legislature. Speaker Fox, true to his word of late last year, instituted vote reporting upgrades to both chambers, by ordering the installation of an online vote reporting system. It has brought Rhode Islanders unprecedented, user-friendly public access to the votes and facilitated reform groups like RISC, which advocated heavily for the change, in its mission to educate taxpayers about their hometown legislator’s voting record.
2,330 bills submitted—more than California and New York
Good start. But then came the ritual introduction of a wild array of bills, totaling just over 2,330 pieces of legislation introduced by last count. More than 2,000 new or repeat bills being introduced by a part-time Legislature, governing the smallest state in the union with less than a million residents, is preposterous! The states of California and New York don’t see as many bills introduced within a given session. Beyond the bill count, there have been several notable bumps along the way this year which clearly demonstrate the practices of the Assembly, ranging from hiring, to hearing rooms to the final hysteria which inevitably governs the end of session are in serious need of reform if this Legislature is to truly serve the Rhode Island people.
The ongoing uproar over what hiring protocols were used for highly paid Senate special assistant Stephen Iannazzi; the sloppy treatment of those testifying in committee hearing rooms—the Labor Committees most prominently; and the more recent disturbingly non-transparent handling of the controversial legislation creating a powerful panel to oversee the 195 land tract development, serve as recent examples. Just within the last two weeks, several revisions of this far reaching bill was hustled through the Senate Housing and Municipal Government Committee, and quickly landed on the Senate floor for a full vote.
Senator John Tassoni was then quoted as chastising the good government group Common Cause for continuing to raise questions and rebuffed their Executive Director by saying …” when the bill is on the floor, for you to have questions…shame on you, it’s too late…” with numerous questions remaining unanswered. (Even though Tassoni, as chairman of the Senate committee which heard the bill, was curiously absent for a key hearing, as was bill co-sponsor Senator Frank Ciccone, when citizens groups and knowledge district advocates were attempting to clarify information.)
Legislature not being fair to the public
Until the average Rhode Island citizen, as well as the legislators themselves (!) have true and timely access to the true language contained in revised versions of bills in advance of the moment it hits a committee for final consideration, or the floor for a vote, and has actual hearing room access to the sponsors of a controversial piece of legislation and has their questions accommodated and answered in a timely and non-hostile environment; the public will not be fairly served by its Legislature.
The process is as important as the policy.
Reforms to the process, as others have suggested before, could include tighter limits on the sheer quantity of bills and the development of new requirements governing some standards of advance research, cost analysis models, and the like before a bill is allowed to be brought forth, for example. Time restrictions for public accessibility could be considered as well. How about no midnight budget voting allowed going forward? As a starting point for reforms, it would seem the weary eyed public, and bleary eyed lawmakers, could at least see eye to eye on that.
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Donna Perry is a Communications Consultant to RISC, RI Statewide Coalition www.statewidecoalition.com
