Money manager | The state's new finance chief dives into budget tumult
Photo/Amber Waterman
Ellen Schneiter, the state's acting commissioner of the Department for Administrative and Financial Services, is ready to roll up her sleeves and tackle Maine's budget challenges
Ellen Schneiter spent her second day this month as Maine’s new top budget official sending out curtailment notices to state departments, seeking to fill a $100 million shortfall. The wisecracks soon rolled in. “I had one department head come to me and say, ‘What are you going to do in your next week of work?’” Schneiter says.
As the state’s new acting commissioner of the Department of Administrative and Financial Services, Schneiter is taking over during a wrenching budget cycle. Sworn in at the beginning of July, following the departure of former commissioner Ryan Low, who left to pursue a position at the University of Maine at Farmington, Schneiter at least has plenty of practice at budget wrangling. She’s served as the state’s budget officer for the last four years, and previously as the department’s associate commissioner. “We’ve worked through many different years,” she says. “These challenges aren’t new and hopefully I’ll be able to provide some continuity” through the transition to a new administration.
Gov. John Baldacci’s nomination of Schneiter to the position will be considered by the Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee and a state Senate confirmation is scheduled for Aug. 25.
This also isn’t the first time Schneiter’s dealt with the money matters of Medicaid, the source of the state’s current $100 million deficit. Congress failed to extend Medicaid reimbursement payments to the states, leading to planned cuts in Maine of $40 million in education and $29 million in health and human services. Schneiter’s first job, which brought her to Maine after graduating in 1982 from the University of Michigan with a master’s degree in public health, was in a Medicaid cost-containment unit.
A Detroit native, she later went on to serve as executive director of the Maine Health Care Reform Commission and deputy director of the Governor’s Office of Health Policy and Finance. “I like numbers,” she says. “My interest in the health care field was always in finance.”
It’s just as well. Numbers occupy the bulk of Schneiter’s days, as work on the next biennial budget ramps up. The revenue outlook gets more difficult every year, as costs increase and, particularly now, as federal recovery act funds dry up. “We’ve made a lot of the easy reductions,” in recent years, she says. “It’s not so much the size of the gap, it’s the options we have available to us to close the gap.”
The state retirement system will also need an extra $287 million in the next budget cycle to stay in the black. “Those numbers weren’t a surprise to us,” Schneiter says. “It’s just another challenge.”
Complicating the already tough budget outlook is the impending departure of the Baldacci administration. The governor has pledged to leave the state in as good a fiscal condition as possible for Maine’s next Blaine House occupant, but Schneiter says she hopes a new fiscal team is established early. “I’ve never lived through that in this type of position before,” she says.
Meanwhile, Scheniter’s also heading up a 1,400-employee department that coordinates central services for other state departments and oversees everything from the sale of alcohol to the maintenance of state buildings and grounds. But, as she puts it, “A lot has to do with money. That’s the biggest part of the job.”
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