Becky Edwards

As you know the Utah State Legislature is mandated to achieve a balanced budget. In the past few years this has required a lot of difficult decisions and cuts to programs. This year is no exception. The entire Republican caucus meeting today was spent discussing the budget options for FY 2011. Each Appropriations committee has already made their recommendations based on a proposed 5% cut within their committees. The Executive Appropriations Committee has compiled all these committee decisions and put together a proposed general FY 2011 budget.

This proposal includes $473M deficit. Here is how it will be made up:
$80M from the Rainy Day fund
$103M cut from Public Ed student growth funding
$115M represents the 5% cuts in all committees, except Public Ed
$86M all non-Public and Higher Education Committee cuts
$46M Higher Ed cuts
$43M revenue from one time sources

For specifics, Public Education will receive no additional cuts over last year’s budget. However, we are not funding student growth, which has the effect of lowering the WPU around $90 per student. Funding for the expected student growth of 11,000 new students would require an additional $75M. Higher Ed will be cut 5% on top of last years’ cuts. However, they will receive a $20M backfill from remaining stimulus money.

These budget numbers assume there will be no additional revenue coming in, Tobacco Tax, Vendor Discounts, reinstate Sales tax on Food, etc. If we see additional revenue through one of these mechanisms or things turn around, as a body we will create a list of priorities to be funded first, second, and so on. That should be very interesting as the end of today’s caucus was already full of Representatives lobbying on issues or line items they feel strongly about.

As an aside, the stream access bills were heard yesterday and today, with debate lasting several hours on each bill. I voted yes on HB80 and no on HB141. HB80 failed and HB141 passed. In the end I was not comfortable that HB141 adequately addressed property rights and left too many questions about the implementation of the statute. It probably is good to have passed something so the issue, at least the debate portion of it, can be put to rest, and the living of it can begin. Undoubtedly there will be growing pains, unintended consequences etc. We can deal with them then and HB141 does provide an adequate framework to move forward with.