Lower-than-anticipated income- tax revenue spells the end to state building projects — dome repairs, community college expansions, safety-prompted renovations and the like — starting next fiscal year and for the foreseeable future...
The legislative budget office released the estimate Thursday, saying the state will be $700 million short of previous projections through 2011.
This is, of course, fallout from the 2nd Bush recession. There's really nothing that state governments can do when the economy takes a nose dive - they are constitutionally prohibited from running budget deficits like the Federal government. So what ends up happening? No new projects - be they for grade schools, colleges or our crumbling roads and bridges. That alone won't cover the shortfall so the legislature and governor's office will have to look to cut budgets of already existing programs. When Ritter took office there was a study done across all state agencies of their existing budget, future needs etc. What the study showed was the state government (after the 1st Bush recession and a decade of Republican state house and gubernatorial rule) was already being run on a tight budget. There was very little waste in the system. As they say, when there's no fat left to be trimmed you are left to cut bone - and that's what's coming for the state of Colorado and it's public services.
This is also pretty much the death knell for any of the Ritter administration's big policy ideas. This is why their slow and deliberate style was so frustrating. They have a limited time in office and economic good times (and Ref C) will not last forever. Deciding to spend the first 2 years in office studying every problem and not taking any real action puts you in a bind. Now they will have studies on transportation, health care and education (among others) which will lay out strategies and policy prescriptions that the state cannot afford to undertake - they've already abandoned health care reform. There was some good movement last year in the area of renewable energy but beyond that there have been very few big policy accomplishments. Considering that Ritter rode into office with a blowout victory and expanded Democratic majorities in the House and Senate a lack of substantive progress on the big issues facing the state is a serious failure.
2 comments:
Where is all the Ref C money going? Funny how you don't realyl hear that much about that these days.
Not looking good for me to get any type of raise anytime soon.
The Ref C money is going where they said, health care, schools and tranpsortation. Ref C money though was just designed to get us back to pre-recession levels of funding, it was meant for us to keep pace and it barely covered that with prior predictions. Now that we've hit another recession those predictions will fall short.
Definitely no raises for state employees in the future.
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