Fifth Veto Dooms Bill To Cut State Mandate Costs

Legislation pressed by House Speaker Michael Simpson to relieve cities and counties of the cost of complying with state mandates was vetoed Monday by Gov. Phil Batt.

In wrapping up consideration of the 409 bills sent him by lawmakers this winter, Batt called the purposes of the mandates proposal laudable in that the state should not impose unnecessary financial burdens on local governments.

But, the governor said in his veto message, the measure “could result in creative ways to obtain state funding and also to bring a large quantity of litigation.”

In issuing his fifth and final veto of the year, he also cited the legal problems with enforcing the requirements laid out four weeks ago by Attorney General Alan Lance.

The bill, which barely cleared the House on its final vote of the 1997 session, required the state to either come up with the cash or give cities and counties a way to raise the money to finance mandates imposed by the state if the impact is $25,000 on a single government or $500,000 statewide.

It was patterned after Idaho Republican Sen. Dirk Kempthorne’s federal mandates legislation that essentially prohibits the federal government from forcing the states to spend more than $50 million nationwide to implement any federal decree.

Batt acknowledged the philosophical similarities in the two propositions, but he said there is an intrinsic difference in the relationships between the state and its local governments and the federal government and the states.

While the states have reserved power to themselves under the federal constitution, cities and counties are statutory creatures of the state and have no intrinsic autonomy, the governor said.

He maintained that the state has assumed more and more financial responsibility for local activities, citing the $127 million in state revenue currently being funneled to local governments each year.

In the past year alone, Batt pointed to the millions of dollars the state put up on behalf of local governments to obtain federal disaster relief for flood areas and legislation just enacted that will ultimately see the state come up with $17 million to match almost $100 million in federal money for local drinking water systems.

“We recognize the limited taxing power of the cities and counties,” the governor said. “But if it’s to be an adversarial relationship, I don’t think we will see that kind of relationship, and I think we would all be the loser for it.”

“We are partners in this process,” he said.