Government : In the Statehouse

March 1, 2013

Since I’ve been at the Capitol, it’s interesting to see how budgeting your money works. The first two years I was here, we received the Governor’s budget and reprioritized it to what the House wanted and the budget we came out with was less than Governor Vilsack’s budget. And Governor Vilsack had a great budgeting practice called “Zero Based Budgeting”, which made all of the departments come in and justify why they still needed programs. This is contrary to just starting out where you left off the last budget and giving more.

The third year, 2007, economic growth was good and the revenue estimates were way over what the average increases in tax receipts were. At that time, the average gain in taxes you sent in was around 3.0%. The Legislature took the Governor’s budget, interviewed the departments…oh, you want $1,000,000, the Governor said you get $900,000, we will give you $1,200,000. That was across all departments and the end of “Zero Based Budgeting”. We increased the budget by $1 billion dollars that year and for the next 4 years, we paid the price. Even having to do a 10% across the board cut in 2010 that hurt everyone!

Another bad practice of ours was using the ending balance of the prior year and pretending like we would have that same ending number the next year. The ending balance is similar to you having money left over at the end of the year in your budget. Mine might be $1000. I will not be counting on that $1000 amount next year and pre-spend it or put it into my budget as a definite. Hopefully with careful money management, I will have more, but who knows what the year will bring?

This week the House brought out their budget targets, or what the total dollars are that we are willing to spend. It is set at 3% growth, a little lower than our average, but we have some room to negotiate and there are many unknowns right now with new federal programs coming down and their inability to prioritize, we see the writing on the wall in regards to those programs receiving federal money in the long term. Our budget does not include the ending balance, because we consider that to be a one time not-for-sure amount.

In the last two years, we brought the budget back into line. All general fund spending is being spent from the general fund – no trust funds set up for anything else (Senior Living Trust or Healthy Iowans Tobacco Trust are two examples) are being robbed to pay for general fund obligations and this was achieved by strict discipline and having to say no to people. We didn’t spend our ending balance on ongoing programs. We spent less than our taxpayers sent in, not more. We honored our commitments and didn’t under pay for any programs as had been done.

We are continuing on with those principals for this budget and it was set this week at $6.4139 billion for 2014. When I started in 2005, our budget was around $4.5 billion. You can see, even with using our strict budget principles, the budget has grown almost $2 billion dollars in 8 years.

As the budget bills begin to move through the House, I will let you know how they are progressing.

The 2012 Graduation Rates for schools came out. You will probably find those interesting. My district numbers are below.

2009

2010

2011

2012

Belle Plaine

83.9

88.1

89.58

84.62

Benton

90.1

87.2

91.11

90.58

Center Point/Urbana

91.7

96.6

93.2

92.31

Iowa Valley

96.4

84.9

86.54

90.7

Union

86.5

96.1

90.72

95.92

Vinton-Shellsburg

72.4

81

78.57

84.5

Other highlights of my week were in committees. In Commerce, I floor managed the Insurance Omnibus bill out of committee. That bill had updates to meet new securities regulations, updates of fines for bad actors in the industry and stronger enforcement measures for them. It covered a lot. Then in State Government Committee, I’d been assigned the Voter ID bill that says you must have a photo id in order to vote on a regular ballot. It disenfranchises nobody, while at the same time protects the right of citizens to have their vote mean something. I managed that out of committee yesterday. Both bills will now come to the floor for debate within a few weeks.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. You can reach me at dawn.pettengill@legis.iowa.gov or 515-281-3221. Have a great week!