Administration officials said if the Senate's budget proposal isn't drastically altered during House-Senate conference negotiations, it would mean a severly crippled government that, for example, is:
Unable to deliver adequate assistance to the needy. Ninety-four positions and $185 million would be slashed from the Department of Human Services' budget request. "It looks like the safety net's gone," said Kate Stanley, Human Services deputy director.
No longer partnering with the private sector for tourism promotion. The state's annual $25 million appropriation to the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau would end in fiscal 1998-99.
But Senate Ways and Means Co-Chairwoman Lehua Fernandes Salling (D, Kapaa) said the Senate isn't adopting "a slash and burn" strategy to cope with the state's ongoing budget woes. Rather, the chamber wants budget appropriations to closely match expenditures rather than accepting a department's projected expenses for two years.
So the strategy is to be tough when examining the first year of departments' biennium budget requests and just as tough when scrutinizing the second-year request, Fernandes Salling said. That means work on the supplemental budget, done in every even-numbered year, will be more detailed than before, she added.
With the Human Services Department, the Senate reduced funding "not because we want to, but because we don't have any accurate projections for caseloads at this point," Fernandes Salling said.
Ways and Means' other co-chairwoman, Sen. Carol Fukunaga (D, Makiki), said the visitors bureau's appropriation goes from $25 million to zero in the upcoming fiscal biennium to ensure that the bureau is accountable for state funds, including the recent $10 million emergency appropriation it got for isle tourism promotion in Japan and the U.S. mainland.
The Cayetano administration is proposing a biennium general fund operating budget of $6.5 billion with a work force of 32,600 the first year and 33,000 the second year. The House cut $100 million -- just 18 percent of what the Senate slashed. The House reduced the state work force by 332 positions from what Cayetano wanted in the biennium's second year; the Senate cut 1,821.
Stanley said her department's request for general funds was chopped by 11 percent in the first year of the upcoming biennium, and 19 percent in the second year -- with most of the cut money slated for Medicaid or welfare-payment programs.
For instance, the administration had asked for $595 million in general funds in the first year, which the Senate panel reduced to $530 million, for a difference of $65 million. Of that amount, $36 million would have been used for welfare payments and $24 million for Medicaid reimbursements, according to the department's initial analysis.
"I don't think we should balance the budget on the backs of the poor, to make such drastic cuts in benefits," said Stanley, who added she was "in shock."
The Senate's budget plan means the department would have to return to lawmakers before the two years are over to ask for emergency appropriations, she said.
The Senate is agreeing with Cayetano's initiative to assist legal immigrants dropped under federal welfare reform by providing funding -- but only in the first year and not the second, to get them naturalized and eligible for other federal and state assistance programs.
Of particular concern to the department is the state's general assistance program, which now assists roughly 6,000 single disabled people.
The administration had asked for $27.1 million to fund the program in each of the two years, but the Senate budget cuts the request to $11.8 million and $10.9 million.
Under state law, the administration cannot ask for an emergency appropriation for general assistance and must cope with the money it is appropriated, Stanley said.
That means those welfare payments would have to be dramatically cut from the current monthly level of about $340, she said.
Robert Nakata, co-chairman of the Committee on Welfare Concerns, said general assistance recipients could end up getting $150 a month.
"That's basically throwing them out on the streets," he said.