Lawmakers got a bit of good news on Friday when new consensus revenue numbers showed they have a little more to spend this year than they thought.
Coming into this year’s legislative session, the revenue projections showed lawmakers had about $285 million to spend, which included just $1 million of one-time money.
The new February projections show there’s about $88 million more of ongoing funding and $12 more of one-time money. That number is certainly a surprise as legislative leaders were downplaying any optimism about this year’s budget, expecting the numbers to be flat with very little revenue growth.
The extra money will help what looked to be a very quiet budget year. So far, most of any surplus was going to be eaten up by public education spending. Last week, legislators proposed spending $170 million for public schools. That included $68 million to cover an expected 10,000 new school students next year and about $90 million for a 3% boost in the WPU.
The budgetary breathing room will help found some new funding requests, but lawmakers acknowledge there just won’t be enough money to go around when they set the final budget in the next few weeks.
“We do not have the dollars to cover anywhere near the requests we have,” said Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, R-Sandy. “We will have quite a job to do paring down the requests for funding.”
Some lawmakers estimate there could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million new budget requests this year. Even with the new budget numbers, legislators will have a difficult time covering a third of those requests.
