After two weeks of public budget hearings by the state House of Representatives, it’s pretty clear that something is going to have to give.
Agencies are lining up for more money, but the state has less of it to appropriate.
State agencies haven’t been shy in their budget requests.
The Corrections Department asked for a $1.16 billion budget increase to cover the cost of pay raises for workers, critical repair costs for decrepit prison infrastructure and construction of two new medium-security prisons.
Superintendent Joy Hofmesiter says she needs a $221 million increase to maintain what we have and another $282 million to cover a $3,000 teacher pay raise. The state’s colleges and universities want $147 million more.
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The Health Care Authority, which runs the state’s Medicaid system, needs $200 million more. And the Department of Human Services and the Transportation Department want big piles, too.
The problem is that the Legislature faces a budget hole of at least $868 million, and we might not have seen the bottom of the revenue spiral.
Some legislative leaders have said some of the budget requests have been unrealistic, and there’s some truth there. No one, including Corrections Director Joe Allbaugh, actually expects the state to come up with more than a billion new dollars to lock up prisoners.
But, in another way, the numbers are completely realistic. They represent that real cost of running the state the way the Legislature says it wants it run. The Legislature created the criminal justice system the way it is, and Allbaugh is just telling the powers that be — realistically — what it should cost.
Similar realistic arguments can be made for all the other requests. The higher education budget increase wouldn’t even get the state’s colleges and universities to the appropriations level they were promised by the Legislature in 2016.
A series of budget failures and vengeful budget cuts have left higher ed at funding levels of a decade ago. There’s nothing unrealistic about the state regents’ request, if we want the public higher education system that we say we want.
In sum, the state has a lot more legitimate needs than it has money to cover, and that means some very tough choices, choices that show more realism than the Legislature has managed in several years.
