Governor Romney has announced his vetoes for the FY 2007 budget (pdf), and has signed the rest of it into law. He vetoed about $573 million in spending, and also vetoed the legislature’s decision to transfer $550 million from the Stabilization (rainy day) Fund into the General Fund.
On the Turnpike Authority fight, Romney did not actually veto section 117 (which would have retroactively extended Jordan Levy’s term into next January, after Romney leaves office). Instead, he returned it to the legislature with a proposed “amendment” which, instead of extending Levy’s term, would require the Authority’s board to meet “at least monthly … in a location that is convenient and easily accessible to the general public,” thereby proposing to undo Amorello’s decision not to meet again until September.
Returning the section for amendment rather than vetoing it is of course a political stunt rather than a serious proposal, but it’s also a clever move on Romney’s part because it makes the legislature jump through more procedural hoops, which means that the issue will get more press coverage. In order to extend Levy’s term in light of Romney’s action, the legislature now has to formally reject Romney’s proposed amendment, reapprove the section in its original form, and send it to Romney again. At that point, Romney will veto it (he cannot return it for amendment a second time), and only then can the legislature override the veto to enact it into law.
I will leave it to folks far better versed in budget minutiae than I to sort out the rest of the vetoes!
That’s the cut in the system total, justified only as “reducing to the amount necessary”. I don’t know any details beyond that.
as a fictional character (the L&O a couple years ago where the professor is the identical twin of the Irish-American gangster, and this new series set in Providence.)
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Unless you have some specifics on what Mitt cut (I don’t), I have to assume he just took $5M out of a $400M-odd budget. I don’t think even zeroing out the President’s Office would get you that much — this is a cut to the public higher education that everyone claims to consider important.
budget exist in a simple spreadsheet format anywhere?
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All I could find was a “paragraph” formatted web page
with line item numbers in the first columns a paragraph or two describing the line item and a “………..” followed by a line item amount.
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I could write a program to extract the useful data but if it is already summarized in a spreadsheet, that would save me tons of time.
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Mark
There’s a pdf on the legislature’s web site (WARNING: large file). But before you do it yourself, I’d suggest getting in touch with Mass. Taxpayers Foundation or Mass. Budget and Policy Center, who might have already done the work for you.
I wonder if this is posturing for the fall election. Sure, the legislature will probably override a lot of this, but if they leave $100m in cuts Romney/Healey will say “see, a Republican in office saved the state $100m”.
Open up the budget, and do a Find Word on this Page search.
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Put in place names – perennial favorites are Dochester, Fall River, New Bedford, Chelsea, etc.
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Type in your town or region, or a keyword for your cause, and see how you’re doing.