Continue the Carnage!  
By John McClaughry

By a combination of state employee layoffs, pay freezes, suspension of payments into the Education Fund, and increased taxes on estates and capital gains, this year's (FY10) General Fund budget will be nominally balanced. But the February 24 "Vermont Revenue and Budget Picture" presentation by the Joint Fiscal Office shows a yawning gap for FY11: $154 million - followed by $254 million in FY12. Add in the projected deficits for FY13 and FY14, and the four-year deficit abyss comes to approximately $848 million.

So far the legislature's leading nostrum for dealing with this jaw-dropping deficit has been the $38 million that they believe will be saved by unspecified efficiencies to be identified by agency heads to meet the touted "challenge for change".

On February 11 Gov. Douglas announced another small contribution to the solution. He unveiled a list of 61 boards and commissions to be terminated or replaced. Upon inspection, 44 of the victims are already inactive. Most of the remaining 17 would see their functions transferred into the bureaucracy, or incorporated into new boards.

The most notable proposed termination is the Public Oversight Committee. This is the successor to the Health Policy Council charged in 1992 with guiding the state's bold march into government-run health care. The POC survived the Vermont Health Care Authority when that body was ignominiously terminated in 1996. Today the POC makes recommendations on hospital budgets and Certificate Of Need applications. Whether the CON program itself has any value is a question that has yet to be asked.

What is more notable about the Governor's list are the boards and commissions that escaped the axe. Many of these serve mainly as taxpayer-financed advocates for some political interest that almost invariably seeks more spending, regulation, and taxation.

Take the Vermont Climate Change Oversight Committee. This was what remained of the 2008 Shumlin-VPIRG omnibus bill to make Vermonters put an end to climate change, after even that year's liberal legislature cast out the really dangerous provisions. This fig leaf richly deserves extinction.

The Smart Growth Study Commission similarly emerged from a stripped down growth management bill in 2008. It will recommend rewarding some landowners and penalizing others in the name of downtown protection and optimum land use. Abolish it.

The Vermont Milk Commission was created in 1965 and reactivated in 1991 to enforce price fixing to extract more dollars from (ultimately) consumers to support farm income. Last year it became the designated agent for imposition of the Shumlin-Starr milk tax, but its members have so far refused to do the deed. Abolish it and end the temptation

The Building Bright Futures Council was created by a Douglas executive order in 2005. Its goal is to promote a "comprehensive and unified [state-run] system for all children below the age of six years". The Senate is about to give this Godzilla of Child Care statutory status and a broader mandate. Abolish it, and kill the legislation.

The Human Rights Commission was created in 1988 as a step toward gay rights legislation that then lacked the votes to pass. It has since used its powers to prosecute a printer who conscientiously declined to print pro-abortion tracts, and to investigate schoolyard scuffles involving a member of a minority group. Abolish it.

The Commission on Women sprang to life forty years ago to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment. The Federal ERA failed in 1982, and Vermont voters rejected a state counterpart in 1986. The Commission soldiers on, however, thinking up more things that taxpayers and businesses could be made to do for the benefit of women. Most recently a 7-3 majority endorsed a mandate on employers to provide employees with up to 56 hours of paid (and broadly defined) "family leave" - this, when Vermont's businesses are struggling with a recession. Abolish it.

Occasionally a board or commission does serve a useful purpose, but more often they are a persistent influence for ever bigger and more unaffordable government, rewarding special interests, and imposing yet more burdens on the taxpaying economic sector.

Vermont has already moved well beyond its legitimate core functions of government. That's why lawmakers are staring at $848 million in General Fund deficits, plus over a billion dollars more in unfunded obligations to retirees.

Whacking 61 mostly inactive boards and commissions is worth doing, but it's high time to get rid of lots more.

John McClaughry is vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute (www.ethanallen.org).