Legislature Seeks Annual Budgeting
Last updated Sunday, October 19, 2008 5:09 PM CDT in News
By Doug Thompson
THE MORNING NEWS
The recent economic turmoil helps make the case for the annual legislative sessions proposed in Referred Constitutional Amendment 2, state Rep. Eric Harris said.
“All I can say about my amendment now is, look at how quickly things can change,” Harris, R-Springdale, said referring to trouble in the country’s financial markets. Harris’ amendment is co-sponsored by Sen. Bill Pritchard, R-Elkins.
The state constitution prescribes that the Legislature convenes every two years, in odd-numbered years. The next regular session starts in January. The only way for the Legislature to come into special session is for the governor to call such a session. However, in that event, the governor also gets to declare what issues will be on the special session’s agenda.
“There’s too much power in the executive department, which wants to keep surpluses if there are any,” Harris said. He would have liked to have had a budget session this year and cut taxes at a time when the national economy is slowing down, he said. Before that, “I think the best year for a budget session would have been 2002, after the terrorist attacks of 2001 led to an economic downturn that reduced state revenue,” he said.
Opponents of the proposal, such as the Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation, have said the annual session would swing checks and balances too far to the legislative branch.
Holding legislative sessions once every two years requires the Legislature to set the state’s budget for two years at a time. The process is difficult and can lead to basing finance decisions on assumptions that don’t hold up for two years.
“Budget hearings start in the fall, and many decisions are made then,” Harris said. Each two-year budgeting period, or biennium, starts with the state fiscal year, which begins in June.
“So actually we’re making some decisions that have to hold up for 30 months,” he said.
What happens in the subsequent two years after a session is anybody’s guess during these financial times, Harris said.
“That’s the basis for Referred Amendment 2, to bring us into the real world,” Harris said. “When our constitution was established, we were an agrarian society that moved at a much slower pace. It was easy to set a budget two years in advance. In the world we live in today, though, it’s an antiquated budgeting process.”
Harris’ proposal would add even-year sessions, but limit them to budget revisions. Exceptions could be made for a particular bill, but only after both the state House and Senate OK’d consideration by a two-thirds vote.
Arkansas is one of six states that still holds regular legislative sessions every other year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a Denver-based state government association. Other states meet once a year. One of the remaining biannual states, Oregon, is experimenting with annual sessions by calling a special session this year, back to back with its 2007 regular session.
The proposed amendment would also make it more difficult to extend a regular session. An extension beyond 60 working days now takes a simple majority vote of each chamber. Referred Amendment 2 would require a two-thirds majority to extend the regular session past 60 days and a three-fourths majority to extend past 75 days. Limits on fiscal sessions would be more strict. The fiscal sessions would last 30 working days. A three-quarters vote would be required to extend them at all, and by no more than 15 days.
Only two states, Wyoming and Louisiana, have restrictions on their “budget only” sessions as strict as what Arkansas proposes, said Brenda Erickson of the legislatures association. Of the two, Wyoming resembles the Arkansas proposal the most, she said.
Dan Pauli, the director of Wyoming’s legislative staff, said Wyoming lawmakers introduce many nonbudget bills in their budget sessions despite a two-thirds majority threshold of their own. However, part of that may be because of the strict constitutional limits Wyoming has on the length of legislative sessions, he said. Wyoming legislators are restricted to a total of 60 days in session in any two-year period, he said.
“The budget sessions have turned into mini-general sessions, where everything’s considered from soup to nuts,” Pauli said. “About a third of the days in budget sessions are devoted to those hard budget issues.”
However, many of the nonbudget bills that reach the two-thirds threshold are never passed or seriously considered because there’s not enough time, he said. The bills die at the end of the session.
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