Posted on: Thursday, April 18, 2002

EDITORIAL
Gamesmanship mars hurricane fund debate

It appears that prospects for using big chunks of the Hurricane Relief Fund to balance the state budget may be dimming at the Legislature.

And as the game was being played out, that might not be a bad thing.

The pitch, primarily from Gov. Ben Cayetano, was that there was money in the fund that could be constructively used to balance a seriously out-of-balance budget and avoid painful program cuts.

Not everyone liked the idea, arguing the money should either stay in the fund to await the next hurricane insurance crisis or be returned to those who contributed.

But in the House, at least, there was strong support for taking about $100 million and putting it toward a budget shortfall that by some counts was as big as $300 million.

Except that's not precisely what was proposed. The hurricane fund money would not be simply put into the general fund, where it would be spent as part of the entire carefully crafted multibillion-dollar operating budget. Instead, the House came up with a detailed — extremely detailed, in fact — list of spending proposals for that $100 million. Most of the items focused on education and most presumably would have ended up in the general fund budget if there had been no Sept. 11 and no tax shortfall.

But the way it was done added up to a somewhat cynical effort to create hundreds of mini-constituencies for using the fund and made it much more difficult to vote against the transfer.

It's one thing to take sides on a use-the-hurricane-fund-or-not debate. Good arguments exist on both sides.

It is another, entirely, to take sides on finding money for such things as the Challenger Center on the Big Island ($47,000), girl's junior varsity sports ($320,000), renewable energy programs ($63,457), Future Homemakers of America ($14,507) and so on for hundreds of items.

In the U.S. Congress, this kind of thing is called a "Christmas tree bill." It's the kind of thing that might make for a smart parliamentary play but is hardly the kind of straightforward budget-writing the public deserves in a time of great needs and limited resources.