Delaware State Representative Greg Lavelle

1/24/2007
House Dems kill proposal to let public review state spending bills

Gilligan: Access to Bond Bill might let disgruntled public ‘disrupt this place on June 30’

By J.L.MILLER and PATRICK JACKSON, The News Journal
Posted Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 7:59 pm

DOVER -- A bill that would have required the state’s annual budget and bond bills to be introduced early enough for the public to have time to review them was shot down today by a House Democratic caucus united against it.

The defeat of House Bill 4, one of the bills on the majority House Republicans’ “Nine in Nine” legislative priority list, left its sponsor fuming about what he considered the Democrats’ hypocrisy for campaigning on open-government issues in the last election.

“Eighteen to nothing. It’s an outrage, an absolute outrage,” Sharpley Republican Rep. Greg Lavelle said in the hallway after the vote. The Democrats voted 18-0 against H.B. 4, while the Republicans could muster only 17 votes for it.

“[Rep.] John Kowalko [D-Newark South] and all of these new people come down and they’re going to change how government works. ... FOIA this and FOIA that,” Lavelle said, referring to the Freedom of Information Act. “Can’t we take some baby steps and at least get halfway there?”

“That’s not an open-government bill,” Kowalko said later. “If they want an open-government bill, they should open up all Bond Bill and Joint Finance Committee discussions to the public.”

H.B. 4 would have required the budget to be introduced at least three legislative days before the June 30 adjournment deadline and the Bond Bill to be introduced at least two legislative days before June 30.

In practice, the budget has been introduced well within that time frame. But the Bond Bill, which pays for road and school construction, often is introduced in the waning hours of the session.

House Minority Leader Robert F. Gilligan, D-Sherwood Park, said the Bond Bill is late for a reason.

“It’s very difficult to put the Bond Bill together at the very last minute,” he said, noting that legislators need to know how much cash they can devote to the bill -- which requires the budget to be worked out first.

In addition, he said putting the Bond Bill out earlier would give time for constituencies that didn’t get funding to come to Legislative Hall and “disrupt this place on June 30.”

Sen. Nancy Cook, D-Kenton, co-chairwoman of the JFC and a member of the Joint Bond Bill Committee, said setting arbitrary deadlines only looks good on paper.

“There are natural time frames for a lot of this work,” she said. “We try to get the work on the budget done the weekend before [June 30] because we’ve got to give the staff time to go over the bill and to get it to the print shop, then proof it.”

John Flaherty, a lobbyist for Delaware Common Cause, said he was surprised to see the Democrats kill the bill. “This was a good bill. There should be deadlines on legislation, especially in June when the House runs a lot of substantive legislation under the suspension of rules,” he said. “This would have given people a chance to see what was in those bills before they came up for a vote.”

Contact J.L. Miller at 678-4271 or jlmiller@delawareonline.com. Contact Patrick Jackson at 678-4274 or pjackson@delawareonline.com.