Budget package almost ready

Portland Press Herald, May 26, 2007

(excerpt) Leaving the door open to one last round of negotiated spending, legislative bargainers put finishing touches Friday on a two-year budget package worth close to $6.4 billion that includes a mandatory school system consolidation plan and does without a major tobacco tax increase originally proposed by Gov. John Baldacci.

"We're going to lose a few of ours and we're going to lose a few of theirs" when majority Democrats and minority Republicans on the Appropriations Committee send their final product upstairs for consideration by the full Senate and House of Representatives, said Democratic Rep. Jeremy Fischer of Presque Isle, the Appropriations Committee's House chairman.

With House and Senate leaders on board and the committee itself strongly united, prospects for passage seem positive.

A wild card, however, is the reception for the school system consolidation component, which seeks to address widespread demands led by Baldacci for a cost-saving reining-in of local school units while accommodating legislative and local concerns about top-down regulation.

Baldacci's original proposal was to establish 26 regional education units, down from Maine's current 152 school administrative systems.

The revised plan envisions 80 units, based on desired student populations of about 2,500. The budget package counts $36.5 million in savings.