Usually, when legislators gather for their session-ending budget deliberations they haggle over how much money is still on the table and how it ought — or ought not — be spent.
Not this year. The state’s general-fund cupboard is bare.
“There won’t be any new money at Omnibus,” said Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Overland Park, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. “There will be re-balanced cuts. We’re going to make additional cuts.”
Last month, legislators learned that March revenues were $57 million below projections. Overnight, the state’s projected ending balance for Fiscal Year 2010 fell from $172 million to $115 million.
It’s expected to fall even further when the state’s revenue consensus estimating group releases its spring prognostication on April 17.
“We are going to revise our estimates for the remainder of fiscal 2009 and for fiscal 2010, and we’re going to be revising them downward. No question,” said state budget director Duane Goossen. “The only question is how far down.”
Goossen, a member of the consensus estimating group, declined to speculate on what is coming.
“We’ll know on April 17,” he said. “That’s all I can say.”
Agency chiefs, advocates for the poor and disabled, and others who have watched their programs and operating budgets squeezed will be hard pressed to get legislators to restore earlier cuts in spending.
”I don’t think we’ll have additional dollars to spend,” said Sen. Laura Kelly, D-Topeka, ranking minority member on the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
“The discussion in April, I think, will be ‘How do we make up the additional deficit?’ and that’s when the philosophical battle will begin,” she said.
Kelly said she doubted budgets will be cut much further.
“I think we’ve looked far, wide and deep to find programs and services that could be cut,” she said. “There may be more there, but I don’t think there’s much more. I think we’ve got to look on the revenue side.”
In her proposed budget for fiscal 2010, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius recommended several budget balancing measures totaling more than $300 million. Many but not all of those options were exercised by the Legislature before it took first adjournment last week.
Among the cuts, funding shifts or spending delays on the governor’s list that might still be possible:
• Suspending the “phased in” elimination of estate and corporate franchise taxes.
• Suspending the sharing of state liquor- tax revenues with cities and counties.
• Delaying the repayment of highway-fund loans.
• “Sweeping” several fee-fund balances into the State General Fund.
• Suspending the “property tax slider,” which are payments the state promised to make to local governments to help make up for property tax dollars lost when the Legislature recently exempted business machinery equipment from the property tax base. The payments were intended to ease the shifting of the property tax burden to homeowners.
• Budgeting to spend the expected receipt of more than $50 million in casino privilege fees.
“There are a number of things still on the table that the Legislature has chosen not to do,” Goossen said.
Some legislators, Kelly said, might be ready to reconsider those options when they come back for the wrap-up session.
“I don’t think anyone wants to increase taxes,” she said, “but some things like suspending some tax cuts ought to be an option. Some of my colleagues who’ve been reluctant to discuss such things are now, at least, recognizing the possibility.”
Yoder said his committee will “take a serious look” at suspending the planned phase-out of the business franchise and estate taxes.
“It’ll be part of the Omnibus discussion,” he said. “But what the governor has proposed comes to about $30 million. We’re already down $114 million; the $57 million we’re down in ’09, won’t carry over to ’10, so we’re down $114 million. That $30 million is a drop in the bucket.”
Yoder said he’s against counting the casino revenues until they are in hand.
“You may recall the governor plugged the casino money in her budget last year and Legislature, for most part, did not agree with spending it,” Yoder said. “Since then, we’ve been proven correct. If we’d spent the gaming money last year, we’d be in an even bigger hole this year.”
He also resisted sweeping fee funds to boost the state general fund’s bottom line.
“We need to be very cautious that we don’t get into the habit of raiding other entities’ funding because we, as legislators, haven’t been able to manage our budget,” Yoder said. “I mean is it appropriate for the state to order cosmetologists and real estate agents to pay fees to the boards that regulate them and then, when times get tough, swoop in and take those fees? I don’t think so.”
Yoder said that if there’s to be any additional funding for social services during Omnibus, it will have the come from a “new area.”
The most likely target, he said, will be the public school system.
“Since the beginning of the session, we have believed that the governor’s position that education should not take any cuts and that, instead, those cuts should come out of the disabled and poor continues to be inappropriate,” Yoder said.
The Legislature reconvenes for its veto session on April 29.