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Burying controversy in budget compromises voice of citizens

For the past 55 years, the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance has published the state’s only high school text on state-local government. In it, we assure young people that “Wisconsin’s lawmaking process gives a citizen many opportunities to observe and participate.

The problem with this promise is that it might not apply in Wisconsin this year. Many important statutory changes will be folded into the state’s two-year budget, where they will never be referred to legislative standing committees, never be scrutinized through the hearing process and, in some cases, never even be discussed.

The governor’s 2009-11 budget bill now before the Legislature’s 16-member Joint Committee on Finance (JCF) contain scores of changes that have little to do with state finances. These include a statewide smoking ban, faculty unionization, insurance mandates that increase costs both to insurers and consumers, domestic partner rights and benefits, repeal of the state’s limit on school compensation growth, a host of state criminal law changes and many more.

Sadly, this is not a new development. Since the late ’60s, the biennial budget has evolved from a fiscal bill of several hundred pages to an omnibus one that can exceed 2,000. One indicator of this trend is the number of “nonfiscal policy” items found in budgets by the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB). Since 1993, that figure has averaged 83, and ranged from 21 to 150.

More than 15 years ago, budget experts warned that Wisconsin’s “policy-in-the-budget” practice was impairing state budgeting—and the very basis of representative democracy: lawmaking. In March 1993, LFB Director Bob Lang told lawmakers that the legislative process suffered when policy issues were included in the budget. The next month, legislative leaders of both parties agreed to reform the process, removing 110 nonfiscal items from Republican Gov. Thompson’s budget.

The practice of excising nonfiscal policy from budgets has continued ever since. The LFB recently offered a list of 80 “nonfiscal items” that could be removed from the budget and reintroduced as separate legislation. In a departure from the norm, however, the co-chairs of the finance committee decided to leave in the budget 40 of those items, including all mentioned above.

Don’t get me wrong. Many of these proposals are serious and deserve honest, open discussion by both rank-and-file legislators and citizens. Whether they merit enactment or not, I leave for others to decide. But the place for that open discussion is in public hearings, standing committees and open floor debate.

The decision by state political leaders, both executive and legislative, to bypass the lawmaking process and “bury” controversial proposals in the budget circumvents the promise of representative democracy that we make to our children.

My predecessor at the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance wrote at the time of the 1993 reforms: “The new process will stick only if it has the continuous strong support of legislative leaders of both houses and the governor.”

Seventeen years later, we see how prescient he was.

Todd A. Berry is president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, 401 N. Lawn Ave., Madison, WI 53704-5033; phone (608) 241-9789; Web site www.wistax.org.