Minnesota parties' budget plans, clarified

You read it on this website on June 10: "The legislative majorities have offered a 6 percent increase in spending over last year's budget -- this includes a substantial increase in spending on both K-12 education and health care."

We mean no disrespect to Ecolab CEO Doug Baker, under whose byline those words appeared. But we fear that, like many others, he may have been overexposed to one of the several spin machines that have been dispensing similarly confusing numbers for months.

In fact, the 2012-13 spending proposed by the Legislature's Republican majorities -- and vetoed by DFL Gov. Mark Dayton -- is $34 billion, or about $340 million less than total spending authorized in the 2010-11 biennium, which ends on June 30.

To their credit, that's how GOP legislative leaders describe their proposal. Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch has often said that "we're spending about the same amount that was spent in the last biennium." House Speaker Kurt Zellers has echoed those words.

The discrepancy arises because of two factors: federal economic stimulus money, and the $1.9 billion "shift," or school payment delay, built into the 2010-11 budget.

The help Congress sent the states in 2009 and 2010 gave Minnesota a one-time $2.3 billion discount -- $1.5 billion for health and human services programs, and $800 million for "budget stabilization," divided among K-12 education, higher education and public safety. That money supplanted state dollars, but did not shrink spending totals.

Permanent shrinkage is what Republican legislators propose for human services programs going forward. Their 2012-13 human services spending bid is $10.7 billion.

The K-12 situation is more complicated, because it involves both stimulus money and the payment delay. Schools were told -- erroneously, it turns out -- that they could count on receiving $1.9 billion of their 2010-11 state appropriation in 2012-13.

They had a green light to spend it. Baker's statement that the GOP 2012-13 budget is 6 percent larger than the last one appears to omit the shift.

In addition, school districts received about $500 million of the state's budget stabilization dollars, on the same one-time basis as human service programs did, and another $470 million sent directly to schools by the federal government, bypassing state controls.

Legislators in 2009 factored that nearly $1 billion total into their funding decisions. All in, the federal-plus-state K-12 total in 2010-11 was $14.3 billion. That's $165 million more than the Republicans propose to send to school districts in the next two years.

Dayton, meanwhile, now proposes to spend $35.8 billion in the next biennium, which would represent a roughly 4.3 percent rise in total spending.

Minnesotans can make a difference in this fight. Their opinions matter to elected officials, and will mean even more if they are backed by a full and accurate picture of where the state has been, fiscally speaking, and where Dayton and the Legislature propose that it should go.

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