Lawmakers and the state budget
By By Terry Cassreino / assistant managing editor
Jan. 12, 2002
It's the same thing every year: Mississippi legislators open their annual three-month regular session complaining money is tight and they could have trouble funding state government.
On Thursday, at a fiscal briefing for House and Senate members, experts warned legislators that the state economy could continue to plod along at a slow rate of growth this year.
But what no one cares to admit, and the one thing most legislative leaders conveniently don't tell the public year after year, is that Mississippi remains financially sound.
In the last six years alone, Mississippi's budget has grown 44 percent from about $7.6 billion in 1997 to about $11 billion this year. The state's next fiscal year starts July 1.
With that kind of budget, Mississippi should have enough money to fund vital services. The problem is the needlessly convoluted method legislative leaders use to craft the spending plan.
Budget process
The budget-writing method which strategically keeps most of the 122 House and 52 Senate members in the dark uses more than 100 separate bills to fund Mississippi government.
Each individual bill requires House and Senate approval. Because lawmakers can debate just that one proposal, they never get a complete overview of state spending.
That is conveniently left to the top leaders in the Mississippi Legislature: the lieutenant governor, the House Speaker and the chairmen of the House and Senate budget-writing committees,
Few others ever completely understand state spending. It's even common for House and Senate members to end their annual session without knowing what the budget looks like.
And the sad part of it all is that some legislators accept it as "business as usual." The process has become so entrenched over the years that it isn't likely to end anytime soon.
Educators unite
Meanwhile, legislative leaders continue to talk about how Mississippi is in such dire financial straits that they may have to cut state agency funding requests this year.
Those lawmakers, though, may be in for a fight.
For the first time, leaders from elementary, secondary and higher education joined forces last week and urged lawmakers to show that they support fully funding public education.
They want the state Legislature, whose leaders have long depicted themselves as major supporters of public education, to fund education before all other state needs.
They also wanted to avoid last-minute bloodshed that is so common in the waning days of the annual legislative session when budget leaders often slash education funds.
Higher education has been the hardest hit in recent years, seeing its state funds steadily decrease from $634 million in the 1999-2000 school year to $558 million in the current school year.
No commitments
Lawmakers, though, aren't making any commitments; it's simply too early. House and Senate leaders won't begin work on next year's budget until February.
Until then, they likely will continue to closely monitor the status of an otherwise stagnant economy and see whether fiscal experts will improve the financial outlook.
Meanwhile, you like most rank-and-file legislators will remain in the dark about plans to fund state agencies and vital services.
And legislative leaders, like state Rep. Charlie Capps Jr., D-Cleveland, chairman of the House budget-writing committee, will continue to talk about how they will do their best with tight money.
Said Capps: "I would like (education) to be funded at the highest level that we can possibly do and I'm working on it. It's not an impossible task. It's just being able to find the money."
