Maine lawmakers have scheduled a work session for a bipartisan bill that would subject state agencies to zero-based budgeting once every ten years.
On Monday, December 15 at 10:30am in Room 228 of the State House, members of the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee will meet to discuss LD 1521, a bill sponsored by Rep. Jack Ducharme (R-Madison).
Cosponsoring the bill alongside Rep. Ducharme are a handful of Republican lawmakers, as well as Rep. Tavis Rock Hasenfus (D-Readfield).
For the purposes of this legislation, “zero-based budgeting” refers to a method of budgeting where all “programs and activities are justified for a budgetary period using cost-benefit analysis without regard to the amount that was budgeted for those programs and activities in a prior budgetary period.”
In other words, all corners of the state government would have been regularly required to reconsider all aspects of their spending and rebuild their budgets from the ground up.
This technique has often been championed by fiscal conservatives as a means by which to restrain the growth of government spending.
As the bill is currently written, all agencies would be required to undergo zero-based budgeting for the 2027-28 and 2028-29 fiscal years – and every ten years thereafter.
The legislation also proposes requiring the development of another type of alternative budgeting system to be used in years when a zero-based budget is not mandated.
Additionally, agencies would need to submit proposals outlining five percent and 10 percent spending reductions during these off-years.
A public hearing for this bill was held during the previous legislative session on April 17 of this year.
Click Here for More Information on LD 1521
Towards the end of the most recent legislative session, lawmakers rejected a similar proposal to establish a zero-based budgeting system, one that had been paired with a plan to abolish Maine’s income tax.
Because of that bill’s duality, its rejection does not necessarily serve as an accurate barometer of how lawmakers will feel about LD 1521 by itself.
It is also worth noting that the bill scheduled for a work session on December 15 is being considered by a different committee than the bill that was rejected earlier in the year.
While LD 1521 is being considered by the Appropriations Committee, the Legislature’s Taxation Committee was in charge of weighing in on the previous bill.
[RELATED: Lawmakers Kill Bid to Abolish Maine’s Income Tax and Require “Zero-Based Budgeting”]
At the time, just three Republican members of the Taxation Committee moved to advance the proposal, leading to both the House and Senate voting to reject the legislation as a handful of GOP lawmakers broke with the majority of their party to join the Democrats in opposition.
The only Democrat to vote in support of this bill was Sen. Craig Hickman (D-Kennebec).
