Let agency analysts keep budget score

Act Two of the three-act drama that is the 2011 legislative session is playing this week in St. Paul.

New GOP majorities are marching into conference committees with budget bills containing whopping spending cuts, politically charged policy provisions and an occasional whiff of something that might be called reform.

Those bills will soon be on their way to DFL Gov. Mark Dayton, where a veto appears to await most if not all of them in their current forms.

As they stand, the bills seem designed to match GOP campaign promises and satisfy GOP constituencies, not to win the governor's signature and become law.

What should follow ASAP is Act Three -- genuine, in-the-open, bipartisan negotiations to close the roughly $3 billion gap that separates the 2012-13 budget proposals of the Republican majorities and the DFL governor.

On Monday, Dayton penned a letter about those negotiations that legislators ought to take to heart.

It set out parameters that are in Minnesota's best interest and are in keeping with practices that have served lawmakers of both parties well for decades. We'd underscore two of his messages:

Every team sport needs officials who call the score and players who accept and abide by officials' decisions. The Legislature's budget-setting game is no different.

Particularly in two budget areas, human services and state government operations, the GOP majorities appear to be intentionally ignoring the "fiscal notes" calculated by those analysts and are substituting their own numbers (see the box above for examples).

House Speaker Kurt Zellers confessed as much last week, saying that, in some cases, his caucus was more confident in cost estimates derived from other states and from private-sector entities than in those coming from state agency analysts.

He suggested that some in the executive branch are intentionally discounting the savings in GOP bills, in order to resist them -- a charge Dayton and state budget commissioner James Schowalter flatly deny.

It's understandably easier for legislators to claim that bigger savings will result from seemingly innocuous changes or unspecified future reform than it is to propose deeper and less politically acceptable cuts.

Republicans can grouse about the fiscal notes all they want -- but they should stick to those notes to build their budget.

2. Nonspending policy matters -- especially those that split along party lines -- ought not be included in budget bills.

Especially this year, when every budget area is laden with weighty controversy in its own right, Dayton is wise to insist that divisive policy matters be segregated into separate bills.

Republicans in both houses were quick to demonstrate their disregard for Dayton's parameters.

On Tuesday, they tossed into higher-education spending bills a highly controversial provision that would ban the use of state or federal funds to finance human cloning.