Late Thursday night, Democrats in the Legislature passed a more than $11 billion state budget. But they did it without a single Republican vote. Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed the budget bill into law on Friday but also urged lawmakers to get beyond the current partisan tensions in order to address the larger budgetary issues facing the state.
Democrats say this is just the first of two budget measures. To explain what's happening, Maine Public State House correspondent Kevin Miller spoke with host Nicole Ogrysko.
OGRYSKO: So Kevin, let's start with the highlights here. What exactly is in this budget?
MILLER: Thanks, Nicole. So it's a baseline budget that pretty much maintains the status quo when it comes to state government. So there are no major cuts, there are no new programs. There are also no new tax increases. And it continues some of the biggest and the highest profile priorities of the mills administration. So for instance, it will once again allow recent high school grads to pursue a community college degree for free. It will also continue to have the state cover 55% of K-12 education costs. And the state will keep sending 5% of tax revenues back to municipalities. And here's a comment from Rep. Drew Gattine of Westbrook, the House co-chair of the budget-writing committee.
"We will pay our bills now and we will have the resources to pay them going forward as we watch what changes may come our way from the federal government. It tells all of the people of Maine and the businesses that operate here that the state government will be open for business when we begin a new fiscal year on July 1," Gattine said.
As I understand it, Democrats either didn't fund or they delayed decisions on some of these other big ticket items, right?
Yeah, that's right. So the biggest is MaineCare, which is the state's Medicaid program. It has a $120 million budget shortfall right now. So that's before we even get to July, when this new two-year budget kicks in. This budget fills that gap so that the more than 400,000 residents who are on MaineCare can continue receiving that care. But lawmakers will have to go back and they'll have to add more money to the budget if they want to keep that current coverage (long-term). Or they're going to have to make other changes to reduce costs. Now, Republicans have been demanding significant changes to MaineCare eligibility. And they also want to make changes to General Assistance. And this has been a big sticking point between the parties, and this is why we ended up with this majority budget.
Maine is facing a budget shortfall for the first time in years, right? And that's part of the challenge here?
Yeah, that's right. So the budget gap was projected to be nearly a half billion dollars before the Trump administration started slashing programs or threatening to withhold all kinds of federal funding from Maine over the issue of transgender athletes. Gov. Janet Mills, she had proposed filling that hole by cutting some programs. And she also proposed a few targeted tax increases — so these are things like increasing the cigarette tax by $1 a pack and starting to tax streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and Spotify. Democrats say they want to have those discussions — and they will have those discussions in what they're describing as a Part 2 of the budget process. But they say they just wanted to get a baseline budget in place that way state government doesn't shut down.
So let's talk about the politics here. There's been a lot of tension at the State House over this budget proposal, right?
Yeah, absolutely. This was a democratic budget. Not a single Republican in either the House or the Senate supported it. Republicans have accused Democrats of essentially cutting them out of the process. Now I have to say that's not quite accurate, at least not for the entirety of the budget discussions that we've seen at the State House. The two parties had been negotiating on a short-term budget to plug that $120 million hole in MaineCare, But those talks really collapsed because Republicans kept demanding welfare program changes and changes to General Assistance. And then after those negotiations cratered, Democrats pushed out this two-year budget. So it's almost a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg issue right now: Democrats say they can't trust Republicans to negotiate in good faith, but Republicans say they don't trust Democrats to listen to their suggestions. So why should they even bother negotiating? Here's Republican Sen. Trey Stewart of Presque Isle making this point on Thursday.
"Call it a majority budget because that's what it is. Explain to people why you're doing what you're doing. And if it's because you don't want to work with us, fine, go ahead say that. But don't say it's because we need to pass something here to give folks comfort. I think what's uncomfortable for them is that we are heading towards such financial catastrophe, particularly as it relates with Mainecare," Stewart said.
What does this all mean for the rest of the legislative session, Kevin?
It doesn't really bode well. The distrust between the parties is very intense right now. We saw that Thursday morning, actually, when Democrats and Republicans in the House got into another floor fight in the middle of this budget debate. But it was over an entirely different issue. It was over the censure of a lawmaker over her posts about transgender athletes. There have always been partisan fights in the legislature. But I would say that this is probably the tensest and, almost, most toxic environment that I've seen so early in a legislative session in all of my years covering things around the State House. As far as what does that mean? The vast majority of the work that's done in the Legislature is bipartisan, and I don't think that will change. But we'll have to see whether Democrats and Republicans can move past this kind of rocky start and actually come together on some of these much more difficult budget decisions that they're going to be facing because of the shortfall the Maine has.
