State worker pay raises make budget proposal

Budget-writing legislators voted to give state employees a slightly bigger pay increase than Gov. Jack Markell had proposed, making cuts elsewhere to make up the difference.

The pay increases the Joint Finance Committee approved Thursday would amount to a 1.5 percent raise or $750, whichever is more. Markell had sought 1 percent or $500.

The raises will cost the state more than $21 million.

"This is the right thing to do," said Sen. Harris McDowell, D-Wilmington North, and the committee's chair. "Our state employees have been behind for a long time."

Thursday's session, which lasted more than nine hours, ended two weeks of daylong meetings to create a balanced budget proposal.

"None of us are going to walk away from here and say we've got a perfect budget," McDowell said. "But we've done a lot of juggling and a lot of balancing to try and get some equity."

The JFC plan is not final. Both houses of the General Assembly must approve it, and further negotiations are likely.

The proposal also only includes the operating budget. Legislators have not set how much cash they will put in the "bond bill' that funds things like construction projects or how much to give in grants-in-aid, money the state sends to nonprofits. McDowell said there will be less money for grants-in-aid then there was last year, which means some nonprofits are going to lose funding.

Tight Delaware budget leaves little room for new programs

In one unexpected and dramatic moment, Rep. Melanie George Smith proposed a rule that would essentially require the United Healthcare insurance company to cover pediatric care at Nemours facilities for Medicaid recipients in hopes of ending an impasse between the companies.

Other committee members said they weren't willing to vote on such a controversial proposal as part of the budget process. It was not passed, but Smith said she would be discussing the possibility of implementing it later.

Mostly, though, the session was about finding places to trim funding and find savings.

The state's budget is set to grow by about $200 million in the next fiscal year, but growing costs for things like public school enrollment and Medicaid have meant lawmakers have little to spend on new programs.

Gov. Markell proposed a few new items in his January budget proposal, which the finance committee uses as a starting point. But estimates for how much the state will collect in taxes have declined, so legislators have had to take out virtually all of the new items Markell asked for. 

On Friday, they took back $8 million in money from settlements with Bank of America and Citigroup from the mortgage crisis and allotted it to other purposes.

In March, the committee said it would use that money for two new programs: after-school homework help and academic remediation for students in early grades. That money will now go to fund existing housing programs, freeing up more money in the budget.

"This one hurt a little bit," McDowell said.

Those reductions were added to the trimming the finance committee did on Wednesday when it canceled a slew of new education programs, like teacher raises and improved bandwidth in schools, and axed other programs, like body cameras for police officers or new drug counseling.

As they wound down the process of writing the budget, the committee's leaders said they aim to do things differently next year.

They moved to require all state agencies except schools to submit lists of vacant or part-time positions in hopes of finding jobs that could be eliminated to save money.

They also put state department heads on notice: Next year, your budgets are going to be put under a lot tighter scrutiny.

"We're talking about taxpayer dollars, and we need to know where every one of them is going," said George Smith, the committee's co-chair.

The committee wants each department to give them details about each specific program the state pays for and how they are judging the cost-effectiveness of that program.

But saying they will take a stricter look at the budget doesn't mean anything's going to change, McDowell pointed out.

"It's way too early to start congratulating ourselves," he said.

Contact Matthew Albright at malbright@delawareonline.com, (302) 324-2428 or on Twitter @TNJ_malbright.