State budget negotiators Friday morning filed their compromise budget for the fiscal year that began last Saturday, with lawmakers poised to pass it Friday afternoon. But Governor Charlie Baker is still nipping and tucking last year’s spending plan.
Baker’s budget chief, in an e-mail to top lawmakers last week, disclosed plans to potentially sweep up to $139 million from a variety of state programs, many of them designated for mental health purposes. Those transfers are intended to help balance the books for fiscal 2017.
The transfers would be effective June 30 and would be credited to the state’s general fund, Administration and Finance Secretary Kristen Lepore said in the letter.
A Lepore spokesman said she sent the letter to “preserve the option” to use the funds to bring last year’s spending into balance. A decision had not been made whether to proceed with the sweep of the accounts, which are typically used as reserve accounts.
Tapping trust funds like those Lepore named is not uncommon at fiscal year’s end as a means of calibrating the public ledger. And Dominick Ianno, chief of staff for Baker’s Administration and Finance office, said, “These sweeps would affect only unspent funds and would not result in any essential service reductions.”
Nearly $33 million could come from the water supply protection trust, and another $23.5 million from the “distressed hospital fund,” according to the report Lepore submitted to the House and Senate budget chairs.
State revenues fell far short of projections during the fiscal year that ended June 30, and economists say this year’s collections will probably underperform the expectations Baker and lawmakers used in writing the budget that both chambers will probably vote on Friday. On Thursday, Baker said last year’s revenues would probably wrap up with less than half the growth on which the budget was premised.
With spending outpacing revenues, Beacon Hill has resorted to an array of budget gimmickry to make ends meet.
Already, S&P Global Ratings last month downgraded the Commonwealth’s creditworthiness because the state did not refill its rainy day fund as it said it would. The writedown was the first such measure in nearly three decades.
To erase the red ink from fiscal 2017, Baker’s administration said it could pull $15 million from the Department of Transportation, $11.5 million from the state agency that works with people who have intellectual developmental disabilities, and $4 million from the mental health information system trust fund. The racing stabilization trust fund would cough up more than $300,000 under the administration’s plan.
Regional health care facilities could come in for a string of cuts, including ones on Cape Cod, the South Shore, and in Boston.
Another $3 million, according to Lepore’s letter, would come from the regional tourism councils trust.
Paul Cripps, executive director of the Plymouth County Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the county last year sent nearly $32 million in hotel taxes to the state, along with another $29 million to local cities and towns, and received $105,000 from the state for reinvestment
“Tourism is a very important industry for us,” Cripps said. “We collect a lot of monies on our own, and we match anything the state sends us. But we need to be able to compete, and it’s a downward slope. A lot of jobs, a lot of businesses depend on it.”
“The state is fiscally challenged? Well, if you give us a little bit, we’ll make you more,” Cripps said.
Jim O’Sullivan can be reached at jim.osullivan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JOSreports.