AUGUSTA (AP) – The State House hearing room of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee began to fill toward capacity Monday morning as panelists gathered to open a series of public sessions on social services cutbacks included in Gov. John Baldacci’s $5.7 billion state budget proposal.

“It doesn’t surprise me. Does it surprise you?” asked Democratic Sen. Arthur Mayo of Bath, who co-chairs the Health and Human Services Committee that is sitting in on this week’s budget hearings.

With program requests scaled back by about $140 million in the Baldacci package, crowds at committee sessions are likely to build.

Commissioner John Nicholas of the state Department of Health and Human Services told lawmakers as the Monday hearing got under way that, with the administration facing a potential gap overall between spending demands and available revenue of close to $750 million, things for the department could have been worse.

The Health and Human Services Department consumes about one-third of the entire General Fund budget. If asked to offset one-third of the structural gap, Nicholas said the department would be facing reductions approaching $250 million.

“Some of these reductions actually are shifts in funding sources in order to lessen the financial impact on critical programs,” Nicholas told the committees in prepared testimony on what was included in the Baldacci package.

“The reduction picture, therefore, is more favorable than would appear when one adds up the columns for each functional area.

“From our comprehensive, intradepartmental review of all services there were almost as many reductions rejected as were accepted,” Nicholas said.

When he unveiled his budget last month, Baldacci suggested that the package was balanced philosophically as well as financially.

He said he had taken pains to minimize reductions in services for needy Mainers while keeping down growth in state spending.

Nicholas used similar language Monday, saying the proposed budget for DHHS represented “the culmination of a series of tough choices” designed to ensure that “our most vulnerable citizens were not placed at risk.”

To date, much of the public discussion about the Baldacci budget package has centered on two other large initiatives: a proposal worth an estimated $250 million over two years that would have the state trade off future lottery revenue to an investor and a lengthening of the timetable for paying down an unfunded liability of state pension plans worth $140 million.

With other lawmakers sitting in, the Appropriations Committee has been holding budget hearings for two weeks already.

One of the first pleas Monday came from the Maine Association of Substance Abuse Programs, representing 24 agencies, urging lawmakers to “maintain staffing, treatment and women’s case management services at the current funding level.”

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