With an estimated $134 million budget deficit for fiscal years 2017 and 2018, the General Assembly had to make some difficult choices to balance the state’s books. In addition to kicking some of the responsibility for removing the red from the budget to Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, the House of Representatives used a tool from the past. Using a tried and true tool called “scoops,” House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello and his team grabbed at least $29 million from various unrelated quasi-public agencies and put them toward the revenue shortfall.
Among the new initiatives that were not removed from the budget to help balance it were the first year of Mattiello’s plan to eliminate the car tax and a piece of Raimondo’s college tuition program. Interestingly, the total cost of those two programs is about $29 million.
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The largest of the scoops is $12.5 million transferred from the System Reliability and Energy Efficiency and Conservation Procurement program, an electricity ratepayer-backed program that funds energy-efficient projects throughout the state. The Narragansett Bay Commission saw $5 million removed from its budget. And the list goes on.
The question is, does this look like a return to the old way of balancing the budget by using one-time fixes, an approach that does not deal with the permanent structural issues that led to the budget problem in the first place?
