| House passes budget, but issues unresolved Medicaid, raises remain 04/11/2001 By Pete Slover / The Dallas Morning News AUSTIN – The House passed its $109.7 billion version of the state's next budget on Tuesday but left decisions on tough fiscal issues to be resolved later in a conference committee. House members batted around the proposed state budget for three hours before passing the plan without signifigant changes.
The two-year proposal, representing a nearly 10 percent increase over spending for the current cycle, leaves many of the session's toughest fiscal issues to be resolved in a conference committee.
Blanks or placeholders marked the lines for items including: state employee pay raises; simplification of Medicaid enrollment, reimbursements for nursing home care; and school employee health insurance.
"What you have is a bill that leaves flexibility to address these issues," said Rep. Rob Junell, D-San Angelo, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
The budget will ultimately be crafted by a conference committee, which as early as next week will begin balancing the House version with a Senate budget proposal totaling $111.7 billion.
Most of the unsettled items are being studied by Legislative committees or working groups, which will suggest approaches to budget writers.
The 921-page appropriations bill took nearly two hours to introduce before the House spent another three hours considering 126 amendments. Many of those were withdrawn, and the changes that were approved had negligible fiscal effect.
The most contentious debate flared not over the meat of the spending plan, but over a tangential amendment that would have cut funds for an anti-fraud fingerprinting program for welfare applicants.
Rep. Glen Maxey, D-Austin, proposed the amendment to shift the program's nearly $2.5 million budget into an effort to get disabled children out of nursing homes. The funding cut was a backup plan for another bill to kill the program, already passed by the House but apparently stalled in a Senate committee.
Mr. Maxey, joined by an diverse bloc of lawmakers ranging from fiscal conservatives to social-service advocates, pointed to data showing the state has spent about $16 million to catch and prosecute all of nine welfare cheats over five years.
"I can't divide in my head, but its a lot of money. And I'd rather spend the money this legislative session helping disabled children." Mr. Maxey said. He said that other measures effectively prevent fraud and accused supporters of the fingerprint system of catering to the private company that runs the program.
Boosters of the system said that it acts as a deterrent and that there is no way to measure how many people would have cheated if it wasn't in place.
"Mr. Maxey accuses me of being at the call of some lobbyist. I used to prosecute these cases ... and Mr. Maxey's wrong," said Rep. Terry Keel, R-Austin. "We don't have as many of them because of what was implemented two years ago."
The proposal to kill the program's funding failed.
The House considered but delayed a measure that would have tapped the state's "rainy day" fund to provide $188 million to raise pay for nursing home aides, home care assistants for disabled people and certain child protective services workers.
Mr. Junell said that it's too early to take that step and that the need to spend the fund could still be averted, depending on cost-cutting measures, revised revenue estimates and changes in federal funding formulas.
The Senate's budget includes a measure that would let the state comptroller spend rainy day money between sessions of the Legislature, if the Legislative Budget Board decrees an emergency.
Mr. Junell implicitly sided with critics of that approach, who have said it skirts the Constitutional requirement for a two-thirds Legislative vote to tap the fund, or a 60-percent vote if the governor certifies a fiscal emergency.
"I think that perhaps the whole membership ought to be involved and if we need to do it, we need to take a vote on it before we leave," he said.
The Legislature adjourns May 28.
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