AUGUSTA — The commissioners of the two departments that consume the majority of state resources are preparing for a tough exercise in budget cutting that they say can no longer rely on nibbling around the edges.

Brenda Harvey, commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Susan Gendron, commissioner of the Department of Education, oversee more than 70 percent of General Fund dollars. The economic downturn, along with a provision in the current biennial budget to find $30 million in savings, mean the Legislature will be forced to cut $100 million or more when it reconvenes in January. Harvey and Gendron know that means deep cuts in their departments.

Rep. Sawin Millett (R-Waterford), the ranking House Republican on the Appropriations Committee, emphasized during a hearing last week that the time for small savings has passed and that difficult decisions need to be made sooner, not later.

“I’m feeling the need to at least start seeing some savings that are bookable,” he told Harvey. “We need to start looking to some bigger ideas. I’m not ready to waste my energy and time on things we can’t do.”

Rep. John Martin (D-Eagle Lake) agreed.

“We’ve been through the same thing now for four years in a row,” he said. “We’re at the point when there aren’t any more (ways to cut funding without cutting services).”

Gendron said after the meeting that her focus is on finding savings that bear as little impact on students as possible, but she acknowledged that ideas about how to do that are in short supply.

“I think there’s a real focus on what we are going to do differently,” she said during an interview with a reporter. “I hope we cannot make just a blanket cut. What are those vital services and how do we collaborate to provide them?”

One area honed in on by legislators was special education. A 2008 analysis of state spending by a firm called McKinsey & Co., which is being used as a springboard for the Appropriations Committee’s process, concluded that there are wide disparities in the state over which students are classified as needing special education services and what services they are provided.

Gendron said in Maine, the rules are open to interpretation. “We have to get at uniformity in the application of services throughout the state,” said Gendron to a reporter following her testimony. “There was a real focus on special education because it’s a real cost driver.”

Gendron is hopeful that a meeting in August with superintendents will produce more ideas about how to make acceptable cuts. So is Sen. William Diamond (D-Cumberland County), the Senate chairman of the committee.

“I’m having high expectations of your meeting with superintendents,” said Diamond.

Health and Human Services

When it was her turn to face the committee, Harvey said she saw little in the McKinsey report that hasn’t either already been implemented in the Department of Health and Human Services or is too complex to have an impact on the current biennial budget. After the meeting, she said the time has come to rethink what the state can afford.

“I am convinced that what we’re going to need to do in this biennium is to cut programs,” she said. “I just don’t see that with the size of the dollars we need to cut … that there’s an initiative or strategy that we haven’t already thought about and put into place. I’m trying to plant in people’s thinking that there are some things that are going to have to go.”

Asked what programs she was referring to, Harvey said, “I don’t know what those are today.”

Sen. Richard Rosen (R-Hancock and Penobscot counties), the ranking Senate Republican on the Appropriations Committee, said he intends to weigh any cuts very seriously.

“One of my fundamental questions is how secure and well-built is our safety net,” he said. “Will there be significant stress in the out-years? Has the extended unemployment system (as a result of the stimulus act) become the de facto public benefit program in Maine?”

Harvey said that’s her concern, too.

“We really need to understand that there are friends and neighbors who are not going to get something they got previously,” she said after the hearing. “If we can ease the anxiety, it’s to say that the most vulnerable, the poorest of the poor, are going to be attended to by our state government. I hope.”

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