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Sunday, June 24, 2007

Ind. Gov't. - More on "New research fee upsets Indiana motorcyclists"; some thoughts

Updating this ILB entry from June 21st, Lesley Stedman Weidenbener of the Louisville Courier Journal has titled her column today "Motorcycle fee increase has more than one backpedaling." Some quotes about the increase in motorcyclist's registration fees, which increased from $17 to $27 in the budget bill, although opponents reportedly thought it had been removed :

"Nobody even knew this was buried in the budget," [Governor Daniels] told The Associated Press last week. "I didn't. They didn't."

Of course, Daniels has a legal staff that reviews bills before he signs them. He has a legislative team that spent many hours this session negotiating the finer points of the budget. They threw a fit late in the session when they discovered one section that would have required them to appoint both Republicans and Democrats to the Ivy Tech Community College board. They managed to get it removed.

That's why Rep. Carolene Mays, D-Indianapolis, said she finds it hard to believe the governor didn't know about the motorcycle provision. "Nothing," she said last week, "was hidden from public view."

"If I was the governor, I would be embarrassed to admit that I did not know what was in the single most important bill in the 2007 session of the Indiana General Assembly, the biennial state budget," she said in a statement. "If I wasn't embarrassed, I would be firing the attorneys and fiscal experts who are supposed to be thoroughly reviewing the bill before the governor signs it into law."

But Mays was doing a little backtracking on the issue as well last week and said she was concerned about the way the issue was "spinning."

Mays is the lawmaker who pushed for the spinal cord fund. Her original proposal would have increased fees on traffic violations to pay for it, but that plan was amended in a committee to also raise the motorcycle registration fee.

In the final budget plan, fiscal leaders stripped out the increased fees for traffic violations, leaving only the motorcycle language and the provisions creating the spinal cord fund.

Last week, Mays sent out a news release praising the bill. In it, she said she picked the motorcycle fee "because there is a proven link between motorcycle accidents and traumatic spinal cord and head injuries."

But later, after that quote appeared in the news, Mays said that's not what she really meant to say. And she said she never intended to single out motorcycle owners with the legislation, although she acknowledged that's the way the language ended up.

That's what makes the final sentence of her statement about Daniels a little funny.

"I do not believe that ignorance or incompetence should be an excuse, especially when it comes to a measure with the kind of wide-ranging impact of the state budget," Mays wrote. "I am shocked that this governor would choose such options."

The "Political Notebook" column today by Benjamin Lanka and Niki Kelly in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette also comments on the matter, concluding with:
Daniels told reporters Friday that the budget was 253 pages long and he had only a little while to review it.

“I signed hundreds of bills, tens of thousands of total pages, and the law gives you seven days to do it. If any governor tells you that he read every line of every bill, he’s probably not being entirely straight,” he said. “I’m not embarrassed, but I’ll accept the criticism.”

He also noted that he would’ve signed the budget even if he had known about the fee because the total budget was “darn good.”

Some thoughts.The conference commitee reports to HB 1001, this year's budget bill, were submitted and adopted on April 29, 2007, the last day of the session. Here, for example, is the CCR filed and adopted in the House on 4/29/07. It is 228 pages long and strips out and replaces everything in the then-existing bill. The ILB doubts that anyone had a full picture of the bill as it passed. This is not a problem unique to Indiana, it exists in other states and in the federal government.

The "budget" itself is only a small part of the "budget bill." The budget part appropriates funds for the fiscal biennium beginning July 1, 2007. The title of the 2007 act reflects that -- "making an appropriation" is only an afterthought in the title, which reads: "AN ACT to amend the Indiana Code concerning state and local administration and to make an appropriation." Pages 1-118 (SECTION 1-36) of the 253-page law set out the operating and construction budgets. These provisions are generally considered to be temporary - in effect for two years.

The balance of the act, pp. 118-253, SECTION 37 through 306, are nearly all permanent amendments to the substantive law of the State on a variety of topics. This has not always been the case, but seems to become progressively more so with each budget.

If the Governor hopes to change anything in the budget bill, his staff has to have caught it and gotten it changed before the final legislative votes.

Once it does pass, and the Governor receives this gigantic bill, he has a week to review it, but his options are extremely limited. The session is generally over, the new budget year begins in a few months. If he finds something particularly egregious, his only choice is to sign the bill anyway, allow it to become a law without his signature, a veto the bill and throw the State into a special session. This quote from the Journal Gazette today sums it up:

He also noted that he would’ve signed the budget even if he had known about the fee because the total budget was “darn good.”
What is the answer? Some say a line item budget. The ILB believes a better route would be to follow the Constitution, which limits bills to one subject. In the case of the budget, the subject is just that -- the budget. Ban amendments to the permanent law of the State from the budget bill. And ban the other route that is sometimes taken, provisions that state "In lieu of the provisions of IC x-x-x", thereby temporarily amending the permanent law of the State via the budget.*

If all of this is too much to contemplate, at least consider use of some of the technological tools now available to produce a more accessible budget bill. The ILB has made a small start , using the bookmarks feature of Adobe Acrobat. Download (right-click your mouse) my partially bookmarked budget bill here.** This after-the-fact bookmarking would be the time consuming way to do it. But LSA has the technology, using XML and tagging, to automate this, and produce self-indexed versions of all drafts of the budget.
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*For more on this, see my article "Enforcing Indiana's Constitutional Requirement that Laws be Limited to One Subject," 44 Res Gestae 9 (2001), available here.
**BTW, the last bookmark I added was to the motorcycle registration fee hike.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 24, 2007 09:15 AM
Posted to Indiana Government