April 15, 2004

Upping the Budget?

Bredesen is warning against the State Funding Board from upping how much money the state can budget for for the rest of this year and next.

Bredesen said he "had been hearing" that the Funding Board meeting "was getting a little politicized" to "make room for some projects that specific legislators wanted to do or change."

The governor said he had heard that legislators "were looking at increasing the ranges or adopting a budget figure way up at the high end of the range, and I had a lot of concerns about that because I'm trying so hard to get us into the fiscally conservative middle of the road on these things."

The "range" he spoke of is the range of percentage growth in tax collections the Funding Board will recommend for next year. This year, for instance, the range calls for growth in state tax revenues of between 5.75 percent and 6.25 percent.

The Funding Board range is not binding. The Legislature can choose to exceed it, but has done so only once in the more than a decade the funding ranges have been used.

Read the entire story here (registration required).

This wouldn't be an issue if we had a cap on the rate of growth of the budget each year (yes, I'm talking about TaBOR). The "politicization" of this issue wouldn't be as much of a factor, and the vampire-like, pet projects of the General Assembly wouldn't suck away every extra penny the state takes in.

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