May 20, 2005
It is May 20th, three weeks after the April 29th deadline and it appears the legislature and the Governor have settled on an agreement that all can live with. The word coming from my caucus is that this budget compromise is a win for the taxpayers. There are no new state taxes and no new property taxes. The size of the general budget actually decreased slightly. There is an increase in education funding. Community colleges are receiving $4 million more than requested in addition to the $7 million in new money they received from the Iowa Values Fund. Teachers are receiving additional salary money in the Teacher Quality package which amounts to 1% of state aid for K-12 or $24 million – an average of approximately $2,200 per teacher. In the early childhood initiative, there is an added $2.3 million which will be sent to empowerment areas for dispersal. The $9 million used to bring the House bill up to the agreed level is borrowed from the Senior Living Trust fund. I find that to be troubling. The state will have to reimburse this $9 million to the SLT next year. As is always the case in the final negotiation process, there are things which one can find hard to swallow. This part is for me.
The next part of the negotiation that increased the budget from the House version is in the RIIF fund. This is money that comes from gambling revenue. Because of the 4 new casinos that have been approved, the state had $13 million in new money from the licenses purchased by the casinos before they can begin to build. Since this money is already designated for infrastructure use, it was an appropriate fit for providing infrastructure money for the Regent Universities and for community colleges. This provides additional money that would have been spent anyway and does not increase the allocation from the general fund.
Considering how bleak the picture looked a week ago, this total budget was a pretty good compromise with a total increase of 7.4% and still allocating $36 million to be refunded to the Senior Living Trust. As I said, it is a proposal that we live with.
I would appreciate your input. My phone number at the Capitol is 641-634-2227, or e-mail me at hgdb@iowatelecom.net.