It’s not too late for negotiators in the Assembly and Senate this week to fix a flawed state spending plan.

1. Leave the Government Accountability Board alone.
Of all the sneaky moves in this budget — and there are many — the Senate’s attempt to hamstring the state’s watchdog agency is most egregious. The Assembly needs to insist on nixing the Senate’s brash attempt to undermine the GAB’s independence and power to delve into and deter government corruption and ethical lapses.
The Senate’s version of the state budget would require the GAB to get money to investigate lawmakers by begging funds from those very same lawmakers. It’s a ridiculous scenario. The GAB now has the power to hire outside investigators whenever it wants to go after any suspicious activity it detects. That’s the way it should be.

2. Remove all non-fiscal policy
A car insurance mandate. Extra liquor licenses for select cities. Changes to asbestos liability law. Permission for regional transit authorities.
The list of non-fiscal policy items quietly slipped into the state budget to avoid scrutiny and tough votes is lengthy and offensive. More than 100 provisions in the budget don’t affect the state’s bottom line, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Many of these provisions have sweeping consequences even lawmakers don’t understand.
The entire laundry list of non-fiscal policy legislation needs to come out of the budget. Policy changes should stand on their own merits as separate bills requiring majority votes in both houses.

3. Pull out the pork
An opera house for Oshkosh. A shooting range for Eau Claire County. Playground equipment for Beloit. An environmental center for Madison and Monona.
Lawmakers have included tens of millions of dollars in pet projects for their home districts in the budget. In a normal budget year, some of these earmarks might be justified. But not this year, with state workers facing furloughs and layoffs, with cuts to public education, with poor children in need of dental care the state can’t afford.
Erase all earmarks so the public knows that sacrifice is truly being made by all to get through the worst budget crisis in modern state history.

4. Drop tax hikes on oil companies, capital gains
The Assembly wants to tax oil companies to raise money for state roads. But even Assembly leaders acknowledge the oil companies will simply pass the cost through to consumers. 
The Senate is proposing instead to force investors and property sellers to subsidize state roads by boosting the tax liability on capital gains by nearly a half billion dollars.
Rather than penalizing investment during a recession, the state should be honest with its road budget by taxing road users directly. If huge amounts of federal stimulus money for road building aren’t enough for state leaders to keep Wisconsin’s highways humming, the Legislature should raise the gas tax at the pumps.

5. Ease impact on schools
Public schools are the biggest budget losers. K-12 schools will have to sustain a decrease in state aid while school revenue caps stay tight.
With the state’s incredible $6 billion budget shortfall, something had to give. And the state’s largest expense is schools. But the Democratic-run Legislature wants to make a bad situation worse by lifting caps on teacher raises — without regard for local economic conditions or school spending restraints.
That’s not fair and is sure to trigger teacher layoffs and cuts in classroom instruction.
Rather than allowing teacher compensation to soar in a bad economy, the Legislature should keep the pay caps in place for now and negotiate a broader package of school-funding reforms this fall. That will keep pressure on all sides of the school-funding debate for a comprehensive fix. In the short term, the best teachers should be rewarded with merit pay.

6. Slice the next shortfall
The budget that’s nearing the governor’s desk pushes huge costs into future budgets. So even if the economy comes roaring back, Wisconsin’s 2011-2013 budget could be just as dire as this one.
The easiest way to minimize a future shortfall is to reverse a blatant accounting trick involving Wisconsin’s school levy credit. The Assembly and Senate versions of the budget seek to give property taxpayers an extra $55 million to $75 million of relief on property tax bills. The politicians hope to ease anger leading up to next year’s election.
But lawmakers couldn’t afford the fatter credit, so they pushed the cost into the next budget.
Budget negotiators this week need to pull back the $55 million to $75 million expense into the 2009-2011 spending plan where it belongs. If they can’t find the cuts to pay for the expanded credit now, then they should swallow hard and admit that property taxes have to rise for the state to get by.