BY JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE – The House Finance Committee has just started wrestling with a mammoth supplemental budget for the current year, and the budget for fiscal year 2010 is almost on its way from the Carcieri administration. Might a two-year budget cycle be the best way for Rhode Island to get its fiscal house in order?

Rep. Amy Rice, a Democrat from Aquidneck Island, wants to find out and has introduced a bill calling for a constitutional amendment to mandate a 24-month tax and spending plan.
“Like anything, there are pros and cons,” Rice acknowledged last week, “but I thought with our fiscal crisis it might be good to allow long-range planning for our departments, especially since a majority of departments under the executive branch overspent their budgets.”
Rice said she picked up the idea at a meeting of female legislators, talking with a colleague from New Hampshire. “That’s what they do and it works pretty well,” she said. “And their state is doing pretty well.”
“I don’t know how it will be received here,” she conceded, “but we’ll see.”
Gov. Donald Carcieri said the idea, “is worth looking at. A lot of states do that.
“Most that do that have a provision that if you are in a crazy situation like we are in right now, you can come back and revisit it. But we are so used to our system. In Texas, the legislature only meets every other year, a number of states do it that way.”
Budget Officer Rosemary Booth Gallogly said, “I don’t know if it is a good idea. Especially in these economic times, states that have two-year budgets will be coming back to revise them.
House Finance Committee Chairman Steven Costantino pointed out that some states are going in the reverse direction. “Those that have two-year budgets are going to one-year. And they are doing supplemental budgets.
“To go two years before you have oversight on the budget could lead to tremendous abuse in overspending,” Costantino said.
House Majority Leader Gordon Fox, who once chaired the finance committee, worried how budgeters could adapt to changed circumstances.