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Doyle Uses Partial Veto Power On Budget Bill

Legislature Announced Deal Earlier This Week

UPDATED: 12:28 pm CDT May 17, 2008

Gov. Jim Doyle has used his partial veto power to order state agencies to cut deeper and ensure schools will get promised aid payments on time.

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Doyle signed a bill on Friday designed to fill a $527 million deficit in the current state budget brought on by the faltering economy. The bill called for $69 million in cuts to state agencies, delaying $125 million in school aid payments and refinancing the state's tobacco bonds to capture $209 million.

The governor used his partial veto power to order state agencies slash another $200 million and wipe out another $180 million for road maintenance legislators tucked into the bill. He also vetoed the delay in school payments.

"These vetoes that I am making bring this budget repair bill into line with principles," Doyle said. "The budget repair bill I signed keeps our commitment to the schools, and keeps our obligation to pay our bills."

The state Legislature had sent the governor a bill that they called a compromise to fix the state's budget shortfall. However, Doyle has made public that he wasn't happy with a few provisions in the plan that leaders of the Democrat-controlled Senate and Republican-dominated Assembly ironed out after weeks of discussions.

"Through my vetoes, we will make meaningful cuts. Every state agency will have to pull back on it's spending, and the state, in all, will cut $270 million," Doyle said.

The legislation used $22 million that are set aside to update driver's licenses -- which is mandated by the federal government. The driver's licenses fees were recently increased by $10 to accomplish this. Doyle said that he believes part but not all of that money should be used for budgeting purposes. He said transferring the entire amount leaves no money to comply with the federal Real ID act.

One of the measures that Doyle proposed but wasn't ultimately included the budget bill was the hospital tax. The governor told members of the state's Hospital Association that he plans to re-introduce it in his next budget.

Doyle said that Assembly Republicans are to blame for a missed an opportunity by failing to act on $450 million in federal dollars for a hospital assessment. He said the money could have helped greatly in plugging the budget deficit.

The budget repair bill is the first major one where the governor has used his new partial veto power.

Voters last month approved a more scaled back veto power so that the governor can't string together words to change the intentions of a bill.

"It was sort of taking pieces from various consecutive parts of the budget bill and piecing them together and creating something new," said Dale Knapp, with the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.

Knapp said he is a big supporter of the new partial veto power, but he said this instance wasn't really a good test of the limit on veto power because it's a shorter bill and there was general agreement on many parts.

"The big difference was, 'How are we going to deal with school aids?' And the disagreement is solved fairly easily, by the governor just deleting the whole paragraph that delayed those," Knapp said.

Knapp said the budget bill next year will be the real test to see how much veto power the governor still has and how he might be able to still use the power to his advantage.




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