Utah lawmakers hope to find a “chunk of change” to put toward other programs as they attack the base budget this week, looking for places they can cut…but not too much.
Senator Jerry Stevenson, R-Layton, who also serves as the Senate Chair of the legislature’s top budgeting committee, says once again they’re tasking appropriations committees to come up with cuts for this budget year, but they aren’t targeting any particular threshold for the reductions. He said that hasn’t proven very useful in the past since those funds are often given back to the agencies when the final budgeting happens.
“We’re telling our staffers to get into this (the budgets) and see what they can find,” says Stevenson.
Lawmakers are struggling to find extra money for schools this year in the face of a possible ballot initiative in 2018 that would hike income taxes 7/8ths of one percent to boost public school budgets. Finding that money will be tough especially since Utah’s surplus revenue this year is not as massive as the past two years. But, don’t tell Senate President Wayne Niederhauser that this is a bad budget year just because the surplus is smaller.
“2009 was a bad budget year. We had to cut millions from the budget,” said Niederhauser, R-Sandy. This year we saw revenue growth. This is simply a normalization of our revenue stream from what I see. We need to make sure we’re budgeting right. Do we have the revenue streams in the right place and the right amounts to address our needs?”
Stevenson agrees that even though they are looking for places to cut, they don’t want to go too far this year.
“Most economies tend to overreact to a situation,” he says. “Just because we have less extra money to spend doesn’t mean that we’re headed into a recession.”
House Speaker Greg Hughes tells UtahPolicy that a Trump administration may “jump-start” the U.S. economy, and thus bring more revenue into not only the federal coffers but Utah state government’s, too.
February state tax collection updates could mean the Legislature will have more money to spend in the upcoming fiscal 2018 budget, which takes effect July 1.
“There’s not a lot of new (ongoing) funds for next year,” Hughes said.
GOP leaders are looking to the chairs of their individual budget committees to come up ideas on savings — money that could be reallocated into other state budgets, like public education.
But, like the start of last year, leaders are not asking budget committees to trim allocations from the current year’s spending — as, in reality, those early cuts were just added back in later. And all the pain and suffer (and Democratic brow-beating of Republicans) can be avoided, since all budget will likely get a bit more money in the new spending plan.
