Required to avoid red ink but also trying to deliver on politically attractive spending priorities, legislative budget-writers are considering fiscal shortcuts that include some last used during a recession earlier this decade.
Lawmakers working on the next budget are facing steady growth in mandated spending for schools and health care and lackluster revenue projections due to an economy that is still growing but slowing.
That left Senate Appropriations Committee members on Feb. 21 discussing such options as across-the-board spending cuts in discretionary programs and delaying a payment to public schools into the next fiscal year. Also up for discussion: Gov. Janet Napolitano’s proposal to increase borrowing for highway construction and other programs.
The eventual outcome will decide whether lawmakers have money for competing priorities such as boosting teacher pay, building new prisons, replacing shrinking federal dollars for social programs and growing the university system’s new biomedical campus in Phoenix.
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