Session tempo viewed as fine

LITTLE ROCK — Not much has happened through four weeks of the 88th General Assembly and that doesn’t bother Gov. Mike Beebe.

“[Legislators] seem to be very deliberate, going slower than normal,” Beebe said on his radio show Friday. “That’s not a bad thing. There is no rule they have to pass stuff. There are several things they have to pass. But the idea that you have to introduce a whole bunch of bills and pass a whole bunch of laws, that’s not necessarily good public policy.”

The governor has also been slower than in previous sessions in rolling out his legislation. Bills for his planned one-half percentage-point reduction in the state sales tax on groceries and on revamping Arkansas’ sentencing laws to reduce the rate of growth in the state’s costly prison population have yet to be filed.

Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said the governor hopes those will be filed this week.

Neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate has met on Fridays this session, which is a break from practice. In recent sessions, the House has met on Fridays but the Senate typically doesn’t until near the end of sessions.

“We just haven’t hit that fastpaced level,” House Speaker Robert S. Moore Jr., D-Arkansas City, said.

Because there haven’t been as many bills as usual on the agenda, Moore said members agreed that it was better to spend Fridays in their districts with constituents.

Moore said he continues to have meetings on prisons and finding a way to increase funding for highways. He said the prison bill is undergoing a “fine-toothed-comb examination.”

Some legislators said after the session’s third week that they expected the pace to pick up during the fourth week. But it didn’t.

Senate President Pro Tempore Paul Bookout, DJonesboro, said it’s possible that the 2011 regular session could become known as one in which relatively little legislation gets passed compared with other sessions.

“Sometimes it’s not necessarily all about the amount of legislation we handle,” Bookout said. “Part of our job is to make sure that laws that aren’t really necessary, or that may be burdensome, aren’t enacted.That’s part of the process.”

He said he expected things to speed up when the governor’s bills are introduced.

“Some members are not ready to introduce bills,” he said. “They are trying to fine tune some things.”

Forty-five of the 98 House members (there are two vacancies) are freshmen, as are 13 of the 35 senators. Three of the House freshmen are former senators, and seven of the Senate freshmen are former House members.

Republican ranks have grown as well as a result of the 2010 election. Many of those new members have expressed skepticism about the role of government.

Because of that, Bookout said, this may not be the session to enact big-ticket and detailed legislation.

“When you have an influx of new people, there is going to be a different mindset among some,” Bookout said. “But we’re going to have complex issues. There is no avoiding that.”

House Republican Leader John Burris of Harrison said legislators are taking their jobs seriously, taking time to study bills.

“I think it’s the kind of people who won office,” he said. “I think the default position now is, ‘Tell me why we need this law and tell me why it’s good. If you don’t do this, I’ll vote no.’ Before, it was, ‘I’ll vote for this unless I know a reason to vote against it.’”

The co-chairmen of the Joint Budget Committee - Sen. Gilbert Baker, R-Conway, and Rep. Kathy Webb, D-Little Rock - said they are purposely moving slower than usual to make sure the newer members understand the process.

“It works better when you explain things to people so they understand what’s going on,” Webb said.

Baker said the budget process is complicated for a lot of legislators, but especially freshmen. He said it takes time for them to understand that bills’ appropriation levels - which is the authority to spend - are often greater than the amount of money the agencies actually get.

“More and more people on the budget committee are trying to understand those appropriation bills and see how they truly impact state government,” Baker said.

He said that since the election there is “such a focus on holding the line on spending and [legislators] are less likely to embrace government solutions that cost a lot of money.”

Baker said that philosophy will affect what can be done to help prisons and highways.

Beebe’s $4.59 billion proposed general-revenue budget for fiscal 2012 is about 2.5 percent bigger than the fiscal 2011 budget.

The governor has said the only area he sees that can reasonably be reduced from that growth is about $23 million for cost-of-living raises for state employees. He said the rest is necessary spending for public schools to ensure the state provides an “adequate” education as required by the state Supreme Court, to cover prison growth and fund more probation officers, and to increase state funding for higher-education institutions by 1 percent.

Beebe has called this growth “pretty modest.”

Baker has said he favors reducing the salary adjustments and looking at everything else. But he’s said he wants to make sure public schools are properly funded.

Burris said he’d like to see the budget held as flat as possible.

“A lot of Republicans, we think the governor’s budget is too big,” Burris said. “It grows too much.”

He said the money for public schools should be protected but would like to see everything else held at current levels. He declined to offer a specific program that could do without more money.

“The sky is not going to fall” without budget growth to cover inflation, Burris said.

Moore said he doesn’t want to cut too much from the governor’s proposed 1.86 percent salary increase for state employees.

“State employees are essential to the essential services provided to the citizens of this state,” he said.

Webb said money for prisons is needed to pay for housing the expanding inmate population, which is about 16,000,and more money for colleges is good because it means more people are going to college.

But she wants to examine public-school funding to make sure that school districts are properly spending the money the state sends.

“Is all the money being used now the way it’s supposed to be used? We don’t know the answer to that question,” she said.