Legislature's Use of PAC Funds

In case you missed it, the Boston Globe had an interesting article on how the Legislature has apparently been squirreling away money in a reserve account which they're now using to offset cuts they claim to have made. The Globe article claims that for the first round of 9C cuts in October, the Legislature announced $9.1 million in cuts and that for the second round in January, they announced an additional $1.6 million in cuts. The article further claims that not many cuts are actually being made because the Legislature has a little-publicized reserve fund of $32 million, the result of surpluses accumulated over a number of years.

If the legislature has a $32 million reserve fund, it really is well-hidden. The legislature historically used 65 different line-item accounts which, for the 2003 fiscal year, they consolidated into two: one for the House and one for the Senate. (Click here for a full list of Legislative line-items from FY 2000 through FY 2010, as proposed in House 1)

The total amount of legislative appropriations in the last decade look like this:

• FY00: $51,815,807
• FY01: $56,975,326
• FY02: $58,591,135
• FY03: $54,260,572
• FY04: $56,067,472
• FY05: $54,300,572
• FY06: $57,771,907
• FY07: $59,231,814
• FY08: $59,603,655
• FY09: $59,603,655
• FY10: $59,659,898

I'm not quite sure how the Legislature was able to squirrel away $32 million in a reserve account from those figures, but I'd be interested to know from anyone who has any insight into that question.