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Joint committee passes emergency bill
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by John Buchel
Saturday, February 15, 2003
While a joint finance committee passed Gov. Jim Doyle’s emergency budget bill Thursday and moved it to a vote by the state Legislature, Republican lawmakers say the state’s financial troubles are not over yet.
Doyle called the Legislature back into special session to consider the bill, which cuts expenses to help minimize the state’s deficit. When the current fiscal year ends in June the remaining deficit rolls over to the next two-year budget cycle, already estimated to be in a $3.6 billion hole.
“The governor asked us back into special session to consider a partial down payment on the fiscal situation,” Rep. David Ward, R-Fort Atkinson, said. “But he only solved about half of the problem in his emergency bill.”
Doyle’s emergency plan would fill $162 million of a $453 million hole. The Joint Committee on Finance worked through Doyle’s bill in an attempt to find additional cuts and shrink the deficit.
“If there’s a deficit, we’re supposed to get it back down to zero,” said Rep. Dan Schoof, D-Beloit. “It’s fairly unprecedented for us to not be able to do that.”
As one of his first official actions, Doyle asked the Legislature to extend the deadline of his budget presentation until Feb. 18 to allow more time to figure out a solution to the budget problem without raising taxes.
“The governor knows he hasn’t solved everything,” Ward said. “There’s a lot of anticipation to see what he does in his budget next week.”
Schoof said the committee went through Doyle’s emergency bill looking for new places to cut and ways to better rearrange funds to decrease the deficit.
“Most of the votes on … additional cuts were unanimous or nearly unanimous,” Schoof said. “I thought we were making real progress, but the last motion sort of acted to restore spending. I ended up voting against it.”
Three other Democrats joined Schoof in voting against a motion to put savings from other cuts into the state’s general fund.
Instead, the committee decided to leave $22 million in the state transportation fund.
Ward said the four who voted in dissidence wanted to take the $22 million and put it in the state fund with money from transportation taxes and fees.
“There are two pots of money for state transportation: the state transportation fund and money from the gas tax and registration fees. These are two different things,” Ward said. “It would be like taking University of Wisconsin tuition and using it to fund the Department of Natural Resources.”
