Comptroller Peter Franchot grilled Cabinet secretaries and bureaucrats over $128 million in Gov. Martin O?Malley?s proposed cuts to health, family and education programs before he grudgingly voted for them at the Board of Public Works meeting on Wednesday despite advocating for higher taxes.
“We are asking the most vulnerable in the state to make sacrifices, but we haven?t asked the most affluent,” Franchot told a packed meeting. “We?re the fourth-wealthiest state” in the nation, and yet “we?re dead last” when it comes to state and local spending as a percent of personal income, according to legislative analysts.
Republicans called the budget reductions on Tuesday “a drop in the bucket” and “a pittance,” but Franchot, known as one of the legislature?s most tax-friendly delegates during his 16 years there, said, “These are going to have real impacts on real people.”
Franchot spent more than an hour asking state executives about cuts in Medicaid reimbursement to providers, in foster care caseloads, university funding and welfare payments. Hesaid “one of the most troubling cuts” was a $4 million reduction for funds to start a new program for mentally ill and developmentally disabled children.
But O?Malley, who chairs the board made up of him, Franchot and State Treasurer Nancy Kopp, said the $4 million was a reduction from a $16 million enhancement, so the program will still get $12 million. A number of other “cuts” O?Malley proposed also were partial reductions from additions he and the legislature had made in this year?s budget.
The budget cuts, which the Board of Public Works is authorized to make on its own, are part of an effort to cure a $1.5 billion structural deficit in fiscal 2009.
“I think we should not be dealing with it in a piecemeal fashion,” Franchot said. He favors “modernizing the tax code” and doing it “comprehensively, inclusively and fairly.”
“The middle class is paying more than their fair share,” he said.
Kopp said, “I do not believe the most vulnerable among us will be hurt” by the current cuts, but “it?s not as though it was the first set of cuts,” after several years of trimming the budget. She said cuts alone would not solve the problem.
Some of O?Malley?s cuts
» Health and Mental Hygiene: $46 million
» Continue limits on hospital stays: $17 million
» Cut health care provider reimbursements: $11 million
» Corrections: $10 million
» Closed House of Correction: $8 million
» Human Resources: $14 million
» Decline in cases for cash assistance: $3.1 million.
» University System: $12 million (regents will make cuts)
» Education Department: $6.3 million
» Higher Education Commission: $9 million
