WHAT DOES IT say when we open the session cheering about the success of an empty document that, at its very best, would address about one quarter of our $150 million budget gap?

The Times-Argus had a front page banner headline proclaiming "A Fragile Peace" the day after the governor and legislative leadership held a press conference announcing that close to $40 million of the shortfall in the general fund has been solved through a consensus decision on reorganization of how services are delivered.

The headline was probably a regrettable choice of words at a time when much of the public is thinking more about Afghanistan and our Vermont National Guard troops heading to the front lines, where there is no imminent peace, fragile or otherwise. The legislature honored those troops on the first day of the session.

But the headline also reflected a false sense of optimism expressed by state leadership, and left many of us who will be on the front line of actual budget votes bewildered by the naivete – or disingenuousness – of the announcement.

The announcement was made based upon a report that was drafted by a steering committee of one Senator, two state Representatives, and two members of the administration with the help of a consulting group paid $100,000 for its efforts.

That report was accepted by vote on January 5 by an off-session summer committee – the Joint Legislative Committee Accountability Committee – made up of four senators and four representatives. Summer committees have advisory authority, not decision-making authority.

Yet it was merely hours later that it was joyfully announced at the press conference that almost $40 million in savings had been found.

And that announcement, sad to say, is utter nonsense.

The report is aptly named, "Challenges for Change." It does not set out solutions: it sets out a series of challenges to meet budget cut objectives in specific areas of state services. It then offers ideas, an assorted set of ideas, that could be considered by the legislature as ways of rethinking how services are delivered – examples of how changes could be made to save money.

Its bold challenge to have an open mind as we reassess how we do the business is well stated, but it does not identify a penny of actual savings.

The ideas are a start in the right direction, but hardly a statement of solutions, and even if all the challenges it suggests could be achieved, there is still $110 million to go.

Kudos to Sen. Bill Doyle of Washington County, the only committee member to vote "no." And why? Because he, a member of the committee, saw the final report only an hour before the vote to accept it and make it the committee’s official recommendation.

The steering committee, in its defense, said the draft was sent by email 24 hours earlier. Not everyone checks their email 24 hours a day, and the full committee discussion of the report lasted less than an hour.

One other senator raised some questions before voting "yes," but without ever getting a straight answer. What does the report actually mean, in terms of "next steps," or how the recommendations will be evaluated and addressed?

Will the appropriations committees make the major state policy changes as part of the budget construction, or will the policy committees review them first?

Later in the week, word filtered out that the goal was to put the "challenge" decisions into law through a bill that will be ready for the governor to sign within a month.

This decision-making process, then, will hardly be an example of a representational democracy in action. We struggle as it is in the four months we meet to bring as many voices and as much of a range of thinking as possible into the process. A target with this speed will allow for a minimal number of heads to come together to evaluate feasibility of proposals. It becomes a set-up for decisions that may create more harm that good, and simply become wasted effort and money.

Many of the ideas in the report are good areas to explore but they are, at this point, simply vague ideas. Some are ideas that have already been put into place over the last five or more years. Savings in those areas are thus not possible.

If anyone recalls the reorganization of the Agency of Human services just five or so years ago, the concept was to create a "single door" for services that would make it more efficient for citizens and government alike. We passed the law that put that restructuring in place.

One of the ideas in the "Challenge" report is to create a "single door" for services that will make it more efficient for citizens and government alike. Huh?

Remember the efficiencies planned by that reorganization to combined the Department of Mental Health with the Department of Health, and to physically combine them in the same Burlington location – with the administrative assurance that it would be a cost-neutral move?

That change was overturned last session as a failure; it contributed to the lack of leadership that contributed to the failure thus far to close and replace services of the decertified Vermont State Hospital.

This December, the Department of Mental Health moved back to Waterbury. Its prior offices there had promptly been refilled by other departments, so the move required new space. The renovations to the building it now occupies cost $2.5 million to complete.

That cost never came before legislators to approve, because it was included within a budget line for overall state building renovations.

So there is a great deal of work to be done, in a short amount of time, before we achieve this much-touted $40 million in the "Challenges for Change" report that would shrink state government and maintain priority areas for services.

We deferred cuts in last year’s budget in the effort to allow for time to efforts to rethink the budget in exactly this way. Deferring some of those cuts is the reason this year’s budget has so much bigger a challenge. We haven’t gotten very far.

The governor’s State of the State address last week hinted at the bigger challenges to come. That illusory $40 million collaborative savings that leaves $110 million to go makes it clear that there will be no "fragile peace" that remains in place among political parties that are aiming at elections of a new governor and new lieutenant governor this fall.

We will learn much more about that after the governor’s budget address the week of January 16.

The $40 million or $150 million has yet to address health care for the poor – Medicaid – with its hidden cost mechanisms. Will health care reform begin to hear a new drumbeat to "Fix Medicaid First" to show we can fund a public health care system and restrain cost growth before taking on more new expansions?

The "Challenges for Change" touches on school savings in many areas that, at least among our neighbors, have already been put into place: collaboration on purchases and cross-support in administration functions.

These two items, Medicaid and schools are between 2/3rds and 3/4ths of the general fund budget; schools, of course, are only partially funded by the general fund, with the rest primarily coming from the statewide property tax.

As the goose that has laid the golden eggs (rising property values that created a false impression about tax impacts of even faster rising school costs) falls ill with the rest of the economy, forced cuts to school budgets and the revision of the school funding system will begin to take center stage again.

A complete overhaul of the judicial system comes with a promise of saving $1 million out of this relatively small portion of our state budget. Will some of those changes sacrifice access to justice rather than only save as a byproduct of long-needed updating of how the system is organized?

Will we trade off civil rights of people with mental illness so that, as a decimated community mental health system drives more people into hospitals, we can shorten their hospital stays through forcible drugging without court oversight?

Will clear-headed assessment of the pros and cons of extending the license of Vermont Yankee become skewed by economic factors alone?

My great fear for this session is that desperation over the budget will be driving huge public policy decisions with inadequate review, creating the risk of very bad decisions in areas that should not be made based on money alone. I have pushed for and supported rethinking how services are delivered for years – instead of doing the same things the same way just because it’s comfortable – but a fiscal crisis is not what should shape such decision-making.

Failure to have the political will to address many of those issues in a thoughtful way in the past now drives us to the precipice of policies based on money. They might be made by a few budget committee members instead of committees that have the responsibility for developing subject expertise. This has already been an increasing problem in the past decade.

Indeed, I think I would prefer radical short-term cuts and even time-limited special taxes that forced us politically to do aggressive policy assessment, rather than leaping into ill-considered policy change purely in the effort to reduce the damage of cuts.

The only thing I can make a personal commitment to is the ongoing effort to deliver you transparency: the truth from the front lines and the opportunity for your citizen feedback. I serve you with the effort to make judgements I think best meet our state’s needs, but that judgement cannot include your thoughts and insights, or respond to your questions, unless I hear from you. Please stay in contact via email ( counterp@tds.net), phone (485-6431), or by writing to me at 148 Donahue Drive, Northfield, 05663. The full "Challenges for Change" report can be found online by going to the legislative web page (

www.leg.state.vt ) and clicking on the Joint Fiscal Office, which is a non-partisan office for both the administration and legislature. The Joint Fiscal site also includes broad information on the state’s revenues and fiscal status. At www.aoa.vermont (Agency of Administration) you can find the completed "Tiger Team" reports from the administration’s own review of possible areas for savings. The legislative web page also lists committee agendas, and House and Senate bills and votes.