State Rep. Larry Tidemann was on the list of Republican leaders proposing $52 million in state budget cuts and shifts last week, but he didn’t show up at a news conference to pitch the plan.

Tidemann, R-Brookings, is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, so the budget is his business. But he skipped the GOP news conference Thursday, arguing that the list was rushed, incomplete and possibly inaccurate in some of its savings estimates.

And during a deficit-driven legislative session where the search for savings was universal, some proposals on the GOP list were Democratic inspired, Tidemann said.

“Everybody wanted to be on the appropriations committee this year, and some of those (cuts) were identified by legislators on the other side of the aisle,” Tidemann said Saturday. “To say that was just a Republican idea, that would be all wrong.”

Tidemann urged GOP leaders to hold off on presenting the cut list until after lawmakers return to the Capitol for the final full week of the session. Big news comes Monday, when appropriations members see the state’s latest revenue data and make budget projections for the remainder of this fiscal year and the next.

Releasing a cut list prior to that was premature, Tidemann said.

“I said, ‘Is this really the right time to bring this thing out?’ Because we don’t even know the revenue estimates yet. What is the rush?” he said. “The numbers we’re using have not been reconciled with the governor’s office, the Bureau of Finance and Management and even the Legislative Research Council. So if there are errors in those numbers, do we really want them out there?”

Gov. Mike Rounds said last week that there were errors of both fact and judgment in the GOP plan, which he said overestimates savings and threatens to impose unnecessary pain to people and programs. Rounds wants to use existing state reserves to help balance the budget, rather than digging deeper with more cuts now.

Tidemann said lawmakers can and should find more cuts this session. But people and programs, including those in the Unified Judicial System, didn’t get the consultation they deserved before the GOP proposed the list, he said.

“The chief justice had not been talked to,” Tidemann said. “You don’t do that.”

The cut list included higher education programs, which hits home at South Dakota State University, where Tidemann worked as an associate dean. The hit list was a central topic of discussion at a Saturday morning crackerbarrel in Brookings, he said.

Tidemann was one of four Republican leaders named on a statement endorsing the proposed budget adjustments. The others were Sen. Dave Knudson, R-Sioux Falls, the Senate majority leader; Rep. Bob Faehn, R-Watertown, the House majority leader; and Sen. Jean Hunhoff, R-Yankton, chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. They were at the news conference Thursday in the Capitol, without Tidemann.

“I would have preferred to wait with the list, and I voted my opinion and lost,” he said. “They didn’t hold a gun to my head to attend (the news conference), and I chose not to.”

Sen. Scott Heidepriem, D-Sioux Falls, said Tidemann was right about Democratic ideas being part of the list. Key provisions of the Republican plan have all been suggested by Democrats in the past, with little support from Republicans or the governor, said Heidepriem, the Senate minority leader and a candidate for governor.

“It’s all about taking credit. That’s all it is,” Heidepriem said of the GOP list. “The good ideas are ideas that, quite honestly, Democrats have been talking about for months.”

Those include 2 percent across-the-board cuts for $7 million, a reduction in state travel, supplies and equipment for $4 million and another $4 million “excess personal services,” essentially funded job slots that are not now occupied, making the money available.

Heidepriem doesn’t like the GOP proposals for some of the other cuts, including: eliminating a corrections treatment program for methamphetamine abusers, saving $1.7 million; dropping a “drug court” system that provides an alternative to jail or prison, $300,000; and diverting $2.3 million from tobacco-use prevention programs.

Heidepriem said those cuts, like a GOP proposal to save $660,000 by closing a resident-student program at the state School from the Deaf, were “just emotional and designed to get people’s attention.”

Knudson, who is also a candidate for governor, said they’re much more than attention-getting devices. They’re serious attempts to reduce a ballooning state deficit, he said.

“It isn’t easy to propose these cuts. In fact, it’s extremely difficult,” he said. “But we are facing a major budget crisis in this state, and we have to act now.”

Knudson said he was sympathetic toward Tidemann’s argument that the release of the proposed budget changes should wait. But with just one week remaining in the Legislature’s main run, delays posed a problem, too, he said.

“Some of us thought it was important to release it before the weekend so the public could react to the proposal and talk with their legislators,” Knudson said.

He agreed that Democratic ideas were included in the list but rejected the charge that he and other GOP leaders were simply headline hunting.

“I don’t think anybody was stealing ideas from anybody else,” Knudson said. “But there certainly was some amount of overlap, in part because there are some areas where pretty much everybody agrees that savings can be made.”

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com