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Tues: The Mystery Measure
posted at 2010-05-18 23:00 | Last modified 2010-05-19 02:27
NC Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin was not happy today. He’d just discovered that the Senate budget, S897, contained a special provision that would take away his authority to regulate insurance rates. That power would be given to a panel of political appointees instead. He'd known nothing about it till it came out in print.
Goodwin held a press conference in front of the LOB this afternoon to protest the provision. “This happened so fast, in the cover of darkness, that I don’t know who’s behind it, but I have my suspicions.”
Declining to name any names, Goodwin continued, “No matter who’s behind it, ladies and gentlemen, I was elected to stand up for the working people and the consumers of this state. And the small businesses who’re worried about insurance rates.”
If lawmakers want to change his department, Goodwin says, it should be done in the open – not in the budget. “This is not a budgetary item. This is a huge policy change, to take away protections that consumers have.”
Wait... what?
Stripping an elected official of his power would be a major policy change, the kind of thing you might expect Senate budget writers to notice. They didn’t.
Senator Katie Dorsett co-chairs the subcommittee that wrote that section of the budget. “I do not know where it originated. It came to our committee. We included it. And I was not aware of it."
The provision was in the measure when Dorsett and her committee voted to approve it. But that doesn’t mean her co-chair Bob Atwater knows where it came from, either. “Not exactly sure frankly. It was just given to us, all right? … It came through the chairs. I don’t know where it actually emanated.”
One level up, the lead budget writers didn’t know much more about the provision than Dorsett or Atwater did. Garrou, Albertson, Swindell – no one could explain it. “I know that it was put in there to try to structure the insurance ratemaking the same way you would do with utilities and other things,” Swindell said. “But I’m not sure, on the dotted line, who it was that suggested that.”
Senate budget provisions used to be labeled with the name of the senator who requested them. That isn’t the case anymore. But surely if Senate leadership wanted a major policy change, Majority Leader Martin Nesbitt would know about it, right?
“Well, we’re having difficulty figuring that out,” Nesbitt said. “There was a problem with the Beach Plan that they were trying to address. But I think that we’ll be straightening that out here shortly, so you should get an answer quickly. I think we’re gonna take that provision out.”
But should voters be concerned that no one knows where these provisions are coming from? “Well, the bill just got to committee. It is a proposed bill, and it’ll be removed before it even gets here. “
When I pointed out that provisions don’t just materialize from thin air, Nesbitt gave me a long, level look before responding, “I’m just telling you we’re removing it from the bill. That’s about the best I can do for you.”
Enemy #1?
The controversial provision was removed shortly thereafter, part of a technical amendment that was one of only two amendments offered in Approps. Just after that, Senate leader Marc Basnight announced the provision had come from his office. But he said it was a mistake: “I didn’t even know it was in there.”
Basnight represents thousands of coastal homeowners who are angry about rising insurance rates, and Commissioner Goodwin is the target of their wrath. “He worked us up real good in the 20 coastal counties when they stuck it to us with the rate increases.” According to Basnight, the rate hikes were neither fair nor warranted by risk or storm history.
Basnight and other coastal lawmakers have been working on a proposal to set up an independent panel that would set property insurance rates for the 20 coastal counties. He says that’s the only way they can get fair treatment. Goodwin would still control rates in the other 80 NC counties.
According to Basnight, he intended to run it as a separate measure, but his general counsel Beth Braswell mistakenly sent the language to the budget committee instead. “No, no,” Basnight insisted. “I never wanted that in there. That is my fault. Which is obvious I didn’t want it in – the minute I saw that it was in, I said, ‘Take it out!’”
Beam 'em up
Basnight says all the budget chairs and subchairs know what they're voting on -- this was just an isolated occurrence. But Senate Republican leader Phil Berger doesn’t think so. He says mystery provisions show up all the time, and they’re usually political. Tucking them into the budget “bypasses the entire deliberative process that’s set up for consideration of legislation. And unfortunately, what you see is that kind of thing is used as a way to threaten some agency or some individual within state government.”
Whatever happened this time, Berger says it’s obvious the process isn’t working the way it should. “That’s part of the problem with the way the Democrats have constructed budgets for years,” he said. “They materialize full-blown on somebody’s desk one morning…It’s as if it was transported here from an episode of Star Trek, and nobody wants to claim responsibility for all or part of it. The secrecy that surrounds the budget making process is something that needs to change.”
The insurance change is gone from the bill the Senate will vote on tomorrow, but plenty of other special provisions are still in it. Most of them probably won’t survive the House, where the budget measure will get a lot more debate.
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