Senate Journal: Page 932: Monday, April 2, 2001

  Every year, there are appropriated but unspent funds that are returned to
  the state
  general fund at the end of the fiscal year.  The expenditure limitation is
  meant to limit
  expenditures.  Reversions are, by their very nature, not expenditures.

  Reversions are a very real aspect of budgeting, and it makes little sense to
  not
  recognize that fact.  According to the legislative fiscal bureau, over the
  last twenty
  years reversions have averaged over $26 million a year.

  Senate File 66 flies in the face of the legislature's own practice.  The $26
  million in
  average unspent funds each year would be higher but for the fact that the
  legislature
  has often chosen to fund technology projects with reversions.  The state's
  successful
  Y2K effort was started with a legislative appropriation of $15 million of
  anticipated
  reversions in FY 1997.  It makes no sense to assume that reversions will not
  exist for
  the purpose of calculating the expenditure limit but then assume that they
  will exist
  for purposes of making technology appropriations.

  Iowa's 1992 budget reform effort has been successful because it was a
  workable
  approach to limiting spending.  This new limitation would also remove needed
  flexibility in the budgeting process.

  I have, for example, recommended salary savings in the FY 2002 budget
  through
  workforce attrition.  It is not possible to determine at this point exactly
  where this $4.3
  million savings will be achieved; that will depend on which employees leave
  state
  government over the course of that fiscal year.  As a consequence, that
  savings is
  shown as a reversion.  To not reflect that savings in the calculation of the
  expenditure
  limit takes away many of the tools that are necessary to make enterprise
  wide
  decisions about expenditures.

  For the above reasons, I hereby respectfully disapprove Senate File 66.

  Sincerely,
  THOMAS J. VILSACK
  Governor

  EXPLANATION OF VOTES

  MADAM PRESIDENT:  I was necessarily absent from the Senate chamber on
  March 26, 2001, when the votes were taken on Senate Files 323, 339, 407,
  410, 449,
  452, 461, 462, 466, and 470 and House Files 194, 228, and 470.  Had I been
  present, I
  would have voted "Aye" on all.

  MAGGIE TINSMAN

© 2001 Cornell College and League of Women Voters of Iowa

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