were forced to cut services and hike fees, while laying off teachers, police officers, and other municipal workers. To compensate for lost revenue from the state government, communities raised local property tax rates, helping drive up the average residential property tax bill by 22 percent over the course of Romney's tenure. In response to complaints about the high residential property taxes, Romney supported and signed into law legislation that allowed communities to shift some of the burden of rising property taxes from residential property owners onto business owners. He also expressed approval for state tax law changes that would permit communities to raise local sales taxes and fees if the local voters agreed. As with the 2003 emergency revision budget, Medicaid funding, which was responsible for more than one-fourth of all state spending and which had been growing rapidly, was targeted for cuts in the 2004 budget. In addition to proposing reductions in payments to hospitals and nursing homes for care of Medicaid patients, and restrictions on Medicaid patients' access to prescription drugs and eligibility for nursing homes admission, Romney proposed that the low-income Medicaid patients be charged monthly fees for participation in the program, along with co-payments for visits to doctors' offices. The 2004 budget also incorporated further cuts in funding for higher education. Public colleges and universities responded to funding cuts during Romney's tenure by raising mandatory fees 63 percent. Most other areas of state government were budgeted to receive approximately 5 percent less funding on average. Government restructuring plans Romney's budget proposals included savings he anticipated achieving by restructuring the state government. On announcing his 2004 budget proposal, he said that through improving efficiency by reorganizing the state bureaucracy, along with reducing waste and fraud, he would save $2 billion. Democratic legislators and independent analysts called that estimate vastly overdrawn. The Massachusetts Taxpayer Foundation, a nonpartisan, business-funded organization that monitors state finances, suggested the figure might have been closer to $100 million, and Romney himself was eventually forced to concede that the $2 billion figure could not be reached without new revenue. The budget proposed requiring state workers to make larger contributions toward the cost of the health insurance they received as an employee benefit. An attempt to persuade the legislature to relax state rules to allow for the outsourcing of state services to private contractors was rebuffed. However, Romney was more successful with efforts to reorganize