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Sunday, April 11th, 2010
Last week I gave you an update on the progress of the "Challenges for Change" law. This week I will again attempt to provide additional information on the progress of this important legislation. The "Challenges for Change" law was the hot topic of the week at the Statehouse. If you recall, this law outlined a process to improve efficiency in state government while establishing a goal to save $38 million dollars in general fund expenditures. I support the concept of working together to find efficiencies but continue to oppose the premise of working behind closed doors to come up with the plan. In these tough times we have to keep the process transparent and be more accountable than ever to the taxpayer. As each week passes, I remain more and more convinced that passing this law was just another example of political maneuvering by people seeking election to higher office.
As we started to work on the plan provided to the legislature by the Governor's administration, one legislative leader after another streamed into the Speakers office to try to understand how to proceed. The proposals were not well received by committee leadership because they actually were requiring them to make tough decisions on what programs to modify or cut. The cuts were to be based on the performance of the program and not necessarily on who supports it or how long it has existed. This is definitely a new concept in the legislature. In my five years of legislative service, I have not seen a program or a not for profit organization that the legislature wouldn't support. I feel that this is one of the primary reasons that the current expenditures are not sustainable and why we are facing such a large budget deficit.
As mentioned, the legislative leadership struggled all week to get there hands around this process. Each committee of jurisdiction worked on there portion of the proposal most of the week. On Thursday, one by one committees marched into the appropriations committee for there approval. Some were well received and others were rejected. Our Commerce and Economic development committee got our recommendations accepted on the third attempt late Friday. This was very frustrating and in the end seemed like a huge waste of time. I was dumbfounded by their request to remove from the document the amount we were charged to save. In our case it was $ 3.03 million dollars. The chairperson of appropriations stated that she was not aware that we were suppose to save money in this proposal. How can this be? The budget that passed had a $38 million dollar hole to fill. When she presented the budget to the house it was reported that this hole would be filled by the "Challenges for Change" process. Something is not adding up here and I will not support passage of this or any other legislation that does not balance the budget without raising any new taxes.
As your representative, I look forward to representing you and your concerns in Montpelier. In last weeks paper there was a letter to the editor that was critical of my questioning of Vermont's institutions of higher education and my position on taxes. I appreciate the writers comments and look forward to talking to her in person. It is obvious to me that I didn't do a very good job of communicating my message in this case. I accept full responsibility for any confusion and will work to do a better job of communicating all of the facts in the future. I am very interested in hearing from you on any issue at anytime. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, comments or concerns. During the session, I can be reached at the Statehouse by calling 1-800-322-5616 or by cell at 373-5960. My email address is dturner@leg.state.vt.us. My web-site address is www.donturnerjr.com. Thank you and have a great week.