Shumlin wants $20M more for mental health

Each January, as lawmakers ready for the governor to present a spending plan for the fiscal year that begins the following July, they begin drafting separate legislation tinkering with the current fiscal year's budget midstream. That was the package getting the attention Wednesday as a top aide to Gov. Peter Shumlin briefed the media and then a House committee on proposed midyear changes.

Among the pressures on the revenue side, Shumlin and Commissioner of Finance and Management Jim Reardon cited uncertainty tied to ongoing budget deliberations in Washington. Vermont got more than $2.5 billion of the $6.3 billion it spent in fiscal 2012 from the federal government.

In an extraordinary New Year's Day compromise, Congress averted the much-discussed "fiscal cliff" that would have triggered a wide range of automatic spending cuts and tax increases. But the deal focused mainly on taxes, and left spending cuts to future discussions. In Montpelier, Shumlin and lawmakers have agreed to push back his annual budget presentation to the Legislature by a week to Jan. 24, in hopes of giving the federal fiscal picture more time to clarify.

Vermont currently is "not well-positioned to deal with future federal funding cuts, should they come," Reardon said.

He said officials have been grappling with a nearly $11 million downgrade in the state's revenue forecast for the current fiscal year that was issued just weeks after it began in July — a result of a slow economic recovery. That, combined with more people being served by the various departments within the Agency of Human Services, is creating a fresh round of tightrope walking for the administration and legislative budget writers.