Rome is Burning - From Senator Brock

Sent to The Fairfax News from
Franklin County Senator Randy Brock

"Rome is Burning"

Imagine this: Your house is on fire. Which would you do?

a. Call the fire department. Then battle the blaze with every resource at your disposal to save what you can.
or
b. Call a family meeting to discuss how to spend the insurance proceeds.

Few contest the fact that Vermont’s financial house is on fire. We face a $56 million shortfall in the current year and the prospect of $185 million, more or less, in FY2010.

But Vermont’s Senate leadership has chosen response “b.”

Incredibly, Senate committee chairs have been instructed to spend the first two weeks of the legislative session looking for “innovative” ways to spend the anticipated Federal stimulus money.

Legislative committees need to begin work on filling that $56 million dollar hole now, not two weeks from now. Every day we delay worsens the problem. The power of compounding is working against us.

There is no question that it is important to have in place “spade ready” infrastructure projects that will be eligible for the anticipated Federal stimulus payments, especially for those projects that would produce jobs plus to help us repair our crumbling roads and bridges. We also would love to receive funds to help up improve technology to make government more efficient, to move us toward e-State reality, to help alleviate our high cost for social programs and, ideally, to receive funds for early-stage projects that need engineering and permitting before proceeding further. (After all, lawyers and engineers need work, too.) These types of projects can set the stage for a pipeline of new jobs in the future. But to spend two weeks looking for ideas to spend money we don’t have, under rules that have not been announced, for purposes that have not been authorized, seems to me to be a less than prudent course.

Speaker Smith's $150 million bond proposal is interesting, but it has little substance without even a hint of how to pay for it. A bond is like the mortgage on a house. If you don't have a source of income to make the mortgage payments, you shouldn't be given the loan. (Doesn't anyone remember the mortgage crisis?)

The governor offered a bold proposal to get at one of the two intractable problems that we must solve to right our financial ship (the other is Medicaid). The governor is absolutely right in recognizing the unsustainability of a system in which educational spending rises year after year when enrollment is falling. Clearly, as a legislature, our difficult task is to ensure we have a system in which we can give our kids a great education, but at a cost we can afford. We can argue about his conclusions about the efficacy of Acts 60 and Act 68, but he has done us a service by shining a light on the 800 pound gorilla in the room.

I also congratulate the governor for proposing to address the imbalance arising from the fact that we are near the top nationally in K-12 educational spending and we are almost dead last in our contribution to higher education. It's perhaps too early to fully assess the feasibility of all of the things the Governor proposes, especially the controversial issue of level funding educational spending in FY2010. We need to analyze the implications of that on our schools and our communities, hear testimony from all sides and look at the specifics. And, with Town Meeting Day looming, whether or not it is feasible to do that is a real question.

We also need more specifics about permit reform. But it is clear that our convoluted permit process is a major issue that has impeded growth, job creation and economic development throughout Vermont. It’s not just a question of the percentage of permits that have been approved. More important is how many potential projects and investments in Vermont that have been discouraged by a Byzantine permit process, coupled with the prospect of endless appeals. Few would argue that Vermont is an easy place to do business.

Perhaps the biggest problem about what we heard both from the Speaker and from the Governor is a lack of specificity. It would have moved us much further along if we had before us specific legislation that would propose to solve their stated goals.

We hear that bills are on the way. Let’s hope they arrive quickly. If they don’t, the Legislature might actually have to go to work.”

Randy Brock represents Franklin County and Alburgh in the State Senate. He was the Vermont State Auditor from 2005-2007.”