By Patrick Guinane, Times of Northwest Indiana
patrick.guinane@nwi.com
INDIANAPOLIS | A state budget plan inched forward Tuesday while Statehouse brinksmanship hit full stride.
After the Senate voted 33-17 to send the House a two-year, $28.5 billion budget offering modest increases to most school districts, Republicans from both chambers held a new conference pressuring Democrats to support the plan.
"We invite them to join this compromise now and bring the special session to a successful close," Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels added in a statement. "Mr. speaker, please, just free your followers to vote their conscience, and let's go home."
But House Speaker Pat Bauer insisted the GOP budget would put education and job-creating construction projects "in peril." He said Democrats would work toward a more favorable spending in plan in the week remaining before the June 30 expiration of the current budget.
"We'll continue the fight," Bauer, D-South Bend, said.
Education funding remains the biggest bout. The Senate budget would give average funding boosts of a half percent next year and in 2010 to schools statewide.
Despite a per-pupil funding boost of $220, Gary Community School Corp. would lose an estimated $12 million in state support by 2011 because of shrinking enrollment. The School City of East Chicago -- Indiana's poorest school district -- would get $164 more per student but see overall funding shrink by $3 million under the Senate budget.
Growing schools in Crown Point and Valparaiso would get overall funding boosts of $1.7 million and $900,000, respectively. But per-pupil funding would shrink by $84 a child in Crown Point and $35 in Valparaiso.
It's all a product of a legislative funding formula designed to have dollars follow the child while steering greater resources to high-poverty schools. Gary schools would get $9,846 per child in 2011, compared to $5,725 in Valparaiso.
There was one iota of bipartisanship Tuesday, with Sen. Frank Mrvan, D-Hammond, voting for what he deemed a "mediocre" Senate budget because it contains the full $14 million requested to complete Little Calumet River levees.
Sen. Karen Tallian, D-Odgen Dunes, let Democrats' latest rhetorical charge, which is to criticize the "magical" $1 billion minimum Daniels has set for how much the next budget must leave in state reserves. The governor has relented to spending $300 million in rainy day funds, but as Tallian said, he has "drawn a line in the sand" at $1 billion.
Sen. Earline Rogers, D-Gary, criticized Republicans for refusing to consider a land-based casino for Gary while offering a solution for the $47 million deficit amassed by Indianapolis' stadiums authority. She said the GOP has made gambling a "bugaboo."
"It's almost like a paramour-mistress relationship," Rogers said. "No one wants to be seen with the gaming industry out in the public, but everybody is happy to get some of those dollars."
