State’s budget shortfall could reach $1.5 billion

[Blue_Tires]

No matter how you look at it, the forecast is pain.

Spending in the current Virginia budget for fiscal 2010 will have to be slashed up to $1.5 billion if the most dire economic forecast for state revenue prevails, according to the Governor's Advisory Board of Economists.

That figure was the worst of three scenarios the board offered the governor.

Even the most optimistic forecast for state revenue during the current fiscal year, which began July 1, still calls for more than $730 million in reductions in state spending to balance the last year of the commonwealth's 2009-10 budget.

The standard, middle-of-the-road forecast projects a deficit of about $1.1 billion.

That means more cuts to state agencies and the services performed by state government. And at least some of the reduction plans recently submitted to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine by those agencies include job cuts.

"They do include some potential layoffs, and that is a possibility," Kaine told reporters late yesterday.

Since April 2007, Kaine has presided over $6 billion in cuts to the $77 billion fiscal 2009-2010 budget.

The grim outlook was presented at the biannual meeting of the Governor's Advisory Council on Revenue Estimates held yesterday at the Governor's Office on Capitol Square in Richmond.


http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/state_regional/state_regional_govtpolitics/article/KAIN06_20090805-215604/284349/

things are looking up in the commonwealth...the last shortfall was over $2 billion and change...