Budget brouhaha

Missouri's lawmakers have enough problems trying to make revenue cover all the requests for state funding without getting caught up in a political tit-for-tat contest that has nothing to do with putting together a working budget.

But this is a big election year. In addition to helping to choose a president, Missourians also will elect top state officials, including the governor, and a goodly number of legislators, many of whom have reached their term limits.

With political campaigns and efforts to please special interests going on at the same time, there are bound to be a few choice partisan words along the way.

Gov. Bob Holden chastised House Republicans last week because they didn't vote on budget bills before the spring recess began. Typically, the House votes on budget bills so the Senate can take them up when they come back from the break. Under the Missouri Constitution, a budget must be adopted by May 7.

That wasn't a problem when the economy was surging and state revenue was growing so fast that millions of dollars had to be refunded to taxpayers. But in recent years the effort to pass budgets for which there would be enough revenue to pay all the bills has been tough. Extra money has been withheld by the governor in these lean years to make sure enough revenue comes in.

With more of a struggle to match revenue and spending comes a desire to have the best possible revenue estimates. If revenue comes up short, appropriations intended for state programs don't get spent, and this leads to a political war of words over whose fault it is. We've seen plenty of that recently regarding school funding.

For a couple of years, the House, Senate and governor's budget staff couldn't even agree on a consensus estimate of revenue, which made passing a good budget all the more difficult.

Now the Republican leadership of the House has decided to wait on the budget bills, possibly until the middle of April, so that the most up-to-date spending plans can be made based on the best revenue projections.

Holden is howling. He says the House is acting irresponsibly.

The governor should look at the facts. While the House in most years manages to send its budgets to the Senate by mid-March, that doesn't mean any quick action follows. In fact, there have been many years when final deliberations on budgets were held off until the last few days -- or hours -- before the constitutional deadline. As a result, a lot of things got put in -- or left out -- of budgets that were important to a lot of legislators and their constituents.

And don't forget the governor's line-item veto, which means final decisions on those expenditures aren't made until the veto session in September -- more than two months after the state's fiscal year has already begun.

So let's not get in a big fuss about the budget yet. There's plenty of time before May 7 to put together a good spending plan.