Gov. Matt Mead vetoed the budgets crafted by the Legislature for four agencies on Friday, exercising his authority to veto either the entire budget bill or specific line items.
The House overrode two of the vetoes early Friday evening.
In addition to the agency budget vetoes, Mead vetoed a prohibition on filling vacant positions in state agencies and a requirement that he cut 90 state jobs, according to a letter sent to Speaker of the House Steve Harshman. The House voted to override the veto Friday evening.
In his veto letter, Mead reiterated that he did not believe deep cuts the Joint Appropriations Committee made were necessary. The budget is a supplementary one, and the Legislature will convene to draw up a new budget next spring.
“Perhaps unprecedented, the supplemental budget is the third cut to the standard budget in twelve months,” Mead’s letter began. He was referring to cuts the Legislature made during the last session, a number the governor’s office estimates at $67.7 million. Mead himself slashed $249 million from agency budgets in June.
“Wyoming came into this session in much better fiscal shape,” he wrote. He said additional reductions could be necessary for the 2019-2020 biennium budget, but the letter implied the Legislature had gone overboard, as Mead has said previously.
“In some areas, in my view, cuts run too deep,” he said.
Cuts to the Pipeline Authority, the Water Development Commission, the Department of Corrections and the Wyoming Business Council were all vetoed in the Governor’s letter. The House voted to override the veto of the cuts to the Department of Corrections budget.
The vetoes would have restored $4 million to the the budget bill. Without the vetoes the budget bill would have cut a total of $30 million, Rep. Tom Walters (R, HD-38, Casper) said. Walters is a member of the House Appropriations Committee.
He said the budget bill as passed would have generated up to $17 million in savings by prohibiting state agencies from filling any vacant positions and eliminating 90 jobs, which were not identified. The veto, Walters said, would block up to $13 million in potential savings that the Appropriations Committee hoped to achieve.The amount saved by eliminating positions is less clear before the cuts are made, as it depends on the salary of the positions eliminated.
The governor said he vetoed the reduction of 90 positions “because of the uncertainty that creates for state employees and whether or not their job will be one of the 90 eliminated.” The House voted to override the veto of the hiring freeze and elimination of 90 positions.
This story was edited Friday evening to note override votes of two of the governor’s vetoes. The House stood at ease at 7 p.m. and could take up the other vetoes later in the evening — Ed.
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