Budget Negotiators Back at Work

Budget negotiations continue in the Lt. Governors office today

State budget negotiations continue at the capitol today. And with a July 1st deadline looming, MPB's Lawayne Childrey reports on where progress is being made and what parts of the budget just won't budge.

Lawmakers are meeting in the Lt. Governor’s office this week trying to work out an overall 5 billion dollar state budget. Senate appropriations committee chairman, Alan Nunnlee, believes their efforts are paying off.

“We’ve come a long way in terms of reaching an agreement both in terms of pushing money forward to pushing money forward to 2011. In terms of funding k-12, community colleges and our institutions of higher learning. So this is a tedious process but we’ve made a lot of progress.”

The sticking point between the Democratic-controlled House and the republican-led Senate remains how much to tax hospitals to help pay for Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor. House education chairman, Cecil Brown.

“I mean we haven’t even begun to talk about it in the last couple of days and really that’s a function of where we are in the process. The Medicaid chairman on our side and the public health chairman on their side need to meet and they haven’t even met yet.”

Lieutenant Governor Phil Bryant says he chose to hold the meetings in his office to highlight the complexity of the issue. He says the important thing now is to not let politics interfere.

“We’re not trying to make the house look bad, we’re not trying to trap anybody, we’ve got to use real honest numbers. We’ve got to stay to our principles of balanced budgets, not putting in cuts that we know the governor will have to make. We’ve gotta move some money forward. Within those parameters there are hundreds of ways we can reach a resolution and Senator Nunnlee and the house conferees are working on that as we speak.”

Budget negotiations continue this morning at 10 o'clock. For MPB news, I'm Lawayne Childrey.