JEFFERSON CITY • Gov. Jay Nixon has threatened to reduce state government staff if the Legislature moves forward with its plan to fund the state driver’s license bureau for eight months, rather than the whole year.
“This irresponsible tactic of attempting to fund government in a piecemeal fashion, to be revisited over the course of the year, is not the way we have done business in the past, and is not the way we will do business going forward,” Nixon said during a meeting with reporters in which he took no questions. “Our strong foundation of fiscal discipline is supported by a time-tested budgetary framework by which the legislature passes an annual budget that is then executed by the executive branch.”
On Tuesday, House and Senate budget negotiators agreed to a budget plan that includes partial funding for the Department of Revenue’s licensing arm – a retaliatory move in response to the agency’s decision to retain electronic copies of motorists’ personal documents, including birth certificates and marriage licenses.
People are also reading…
The budget proposal needs final approval from the House and Senate before a Friday deadline.
Senate Appropriations Chair Kurt Schaefer, a Republican from Columbia who has been one of the most vocal opponents to the new policy, said the budget plan provided funding for driver's licenses for only eight months so that lawmakers could review the agency again when they return for the 2014 session in January.
“It’s the funding they asked for, but only at eight months,” he said. “We’ll come back and evaluate that and what they’re doing.”
Lawmakers said they expected the department to stop its scanning policy before they would get their full funding.
But Nixon today said lawmakers – if they move forward with that plan – will “leave me no choice: I will reduce staff and services accordingly -- including making the necessary layoffs – effective July 1.”
Nixon said the funding cut affects registrations for boats, ATVs and manufactured homes, in addition to driver’s licenses. He said the tactic – which he called an “unprecedented step” - could threaten the state’s fiscal stability.
“Our ability to ensure the budget remains in balance throughout the year has been repeatedly cited by the ratings agencies as central to our state’s perfect AAA credit rating,” he said. “The unique action taken by the legislature this week would undermine our strong budgetary framework, and would introduce unnecessary and dangerous levels of uncertainty into the historical budget process practiced by governors and legislatures for decades.”
He compared the move to Congress’s reliance on continuing resolutions to string together funding.
Elizabeth Crisp covers Missouri politics and state government for the Post-Dispatch. Follow her on Twitter at @elizabethcrisp.
