New report looks at balance of budget power

Strong governor, weak legislature structure debated

Maryland holds the distinction of being the only state where the legislature cannot increase amounts to the budget proposed by the governor.

The budget process is ‘‘fundamentally undemocratic,” Roy T. Meyers, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, wrote in ‘‘Increasing Budgetary Democracy and Flexibility,” the article he contributed to the report.

But additions are made, in effect, by the more than 600 new laws adopted by the legislature each year, said Cecilia Januszkiewicz, who was state budget secretary under Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R).

‘‘The primary beneficiaries of permitting the General Assembly to rearrange or increase the governor’s budget would be the members of the budget committees and the lobbyists,” Januszkiewicz, a senior fellow with the Free State Foundation, wrote in her contribution, ‘‘The Myth of a Weak Legislature.”

Former Texas budget director Wayne Roberts also contributes an article weighing Texas’s strong legislature-weak governor budget process, which is seen as the antithesis of Maryland’s structure.

Roberts writes that ‘‘since the budget process is heavily weighted towards legislative involvement, statewide goals are often prioritized behind goals of individual legislator’s districts.”

The Maryland Budget and Tax Policy Institute, a project of the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations, decided to focus on the issue when the state’s Spending Affordability Committee, a bipartisan panel of legislators from both chambers, undertook a review of the state budget process. The panel is expected to make recommendations by the end of the year.

The big issues for the committee to consider have to do with ‘‘budget transparency,” said Neil Bergsman, the institute’s director. That has to do with the ability for not only taxpayers, but also legislators and agency heads, to understand what is going on with the state budget.

‘‘I think that we’ve been battling structural deficits for half a dozen years now and I think a lot of people are frustrated with some of the nuts and bolts of our process,” said Bergsman, who worked in the state legislative and budget offices for 20 years.

For more

Read the report at www.marylandpolicy.org