Newsletters & Press

Bean Counter Brown Balances Ideals with Reality

by Bill Minor

(Source: Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Friday March 17, 2006)

State Rep. Cecil Brown, D-Jackson, the quiet "go-to" guy in the Mississippi House, has been carrying a heavy load on his shoulders lately as the 2006 Legislature grinds toward a hoped-for end early next month.

I mean the rail-thin 61-year-old Brown has been carrying a heavy load.

The book on Brown is he is a rare legislative talent: a numbers cruncher with a high social conscience who House Speaker Billy McCoy, D-Rienzi, calls his "unofficial coordinator of fiscal affairs" as well as leading authority on public education.

Brown was elected to the House in 1999 after previously serving as State Budget Officer during the Mabus administration in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his private life he is an investment adviser and certified public accountant.

As the legislative session crunch tightened, his fellow lawmakers naturally looked to Brown even more for answers to all of the state's fiscal or public education problems.

But carrying heavier legislative responsibility is just part of Cecil Brown's worries these days.

Lately, the normally athletic Brown has had to pound the marble hallways of the Capitol in intense back pain from spinal stenosis and a bulging disk, forced to use a walking cane until he can have back surgery when the session ends. His personal troubles don't end there. His wife, Nancy, recently had to undergo surgery for breast cancer and is beginning a long course of chemotherapy. (Brown however says he's optimistic for her recovery.)

Were that not enough for the intensely serious Brown to bear, in the past week he has been caught in a crossfire from his own usually solid pro-education forces. The beef came over Brown's backing of a alternative phased-in plan as an option if the Mississippi Adequate Education program can't be fully funded.

Normally at this latter stage of a legislative session lawmakers' emotions run high when they grapple with the hot-button issue of MAEP funding. But usually it's strong public education backers lined up against foes who argue that accountability rather than money is education's primary need.

Last week the battle lines on MAEP took a dramatic shift.

It came after Brown felt compelled to give education forces a shocker: that despite a rosier picture on state revenues for the first time in three years, there was little chance for fully funding MAEP this session unless lawmakers were willing to make some draconian cuts in obligatory appropriations.

That had come about, he said, because of a huge backlog of un-funded key government services from last year (among them, servicing the state debt and a crisis in state retirement reserves) plus finally giving state employees a raise after they had gone without one for five years. Add to that necessary spending caused by Hurricane Katrina.

He offered an alternative plan to immediate full MAEP funding to be considered by Senate-House conferees: it would phase in over four years full-funding the MAEP formula.

Suddenly a sizable cadre of Brown's usual Democratic loyalists refused to support his optional idea. Some felt their leader had abandoned them in the drive at this session for immediate full-funding of MAEP, whose formula has only been fully funded once (in 2003) since it was enacted in 1997.

Some of his House colleagues were so upset with what they saw as Brown's capitulation on education funding they privately suggested that his back ailment and worry about his wife had taken the fight out of him.

Even one of Brown's longtime close allies, Democratic Rep. Diane Peranich of DeLisle, parted with Brown on his alternative MAEP funding amendment. She contended later that she was "not from the Neville Chamberlain school of appeasement, and I will never be."

After three votes over a two day spate of recriminations — including one lawmaker invoking a rarely used constitutional rule requiring the reading of all bills in full before a final vote — Brown's optional plan won House approval.

Later Brown said he didn't believe the defection of his education loyalists was long-lasting and attributed the momentary split in the ranks to "frustration because we don't have enough money."

Putting the four-year MAEP full-funding option in the legislative picture has strategic value in dealing with Gov. Haley Barbour over education funding, Brown says. "I didn't want the governor to keep beating us over the head as he has the past two years.... This will put him on the line."

To be a valued public servant these days and: strike a balance between your most treasured; cause with the reality of available fiscal resources ain't easy, Cecil Brown can readily attest.

Bill Minor, who has covered Mississippi politics since 1947, is the 1997 winner of the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism. Write to him at P.O. Box 1243, Jackson, MS 39215.