[Vision2020] legislative report from Ringo

[Shirley Ringo]

Visionaries:
 
Legislative News from Ringo

 

The Joint Finance Committee is in the process of setting budgets.  These budgets can be described as austere, and those in leadership will say "with such limited resources, we have no choice."  Everybody needs to remember, it is we in the legislature who are choosing to limit financial resources.  This session is still alive and we have the power to delay the sunset of the 6% sales tax.  There is little will on the part of the majority party to do so, however.  

 

It is important to understand at this time that none of the budgets being set contains money for salary increases.  Decisions related to salary will be made at the end of the process, possibly with the use of a "surplus eliminator."  Basically, as last year for public employees, if there's money left at the end above the targeted amount, there will be raises.  If this occurs as I would expect, there won't be enough for the raises people deserve.  We will balance our budget at the misfortune of public school teachers and state employees, rather than spreading the responsibility among all taxpayers.

 

The JFAC (Joint Finance and Appropriations Committee) appropriation for colleges and universities still needs House and Senate approval.  There are some positive aspects to the budget.  It contains money for the enrollment workload adjustment, which the legislature has not provided regularly.  Those items funded are supplied with general funds, rather than partly using student fees.  However, there are no inflationary adjustments.  The JFAC budget, disregarding salaries, is about $4 million below the Governor's recommended budget.

 

 On Monday, JFAC will consider the public school appropriation.  Leadership has targeted a general fund amount of $986,200,000.  Disregarding salaries, this is about $4,862,000 below the Governor's recommendation and $55,500,900 below Marilyn Howard's request.

 

I was extremely happy to be part of an effort to obtain agreement from the finance committee to provide much needed funding for Public Television.  This budget still awaits approval from the House and Senate.  We are cautiously optimistic.

 

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20050304/1cc4c3e7/attachment.htm