Oregon state revenue snapshot shows negative views
From our weekly issue dated March 25, 2009
The global economic downturn continues to batter Oregon’s state budget, and that is likely to trickle down to county governments.
Josephine County Commissioner Dave Toler said that even though he doesn’t hard any “hard-and-fast numbers” on any cuts, he’s sure that some pain will be felt at the local level.
“I just know we’re seeing reductions in many of our state-funded programs that we deliver,” Toler said. “A lot of people don’t understand that we deliver a lot of services at the county level that are state-funded.”
Toler said that around 85 percent of the county’s operations budget consists of pass-through dollars from the state. Aside from that, he said, many of the county’s departments operate almost entirely on state funds.
Those include the Community Corrections Division and Public Health, which Toler said will be drastically affected.
“Other than fees, it’s all state-funded,” he said. “They don’t get any general fund dollars, either.”
State Rep. Dennis Richardson (R-Central Point) sits on the Legislature’s budget-writing Ways & Means Committee.
In his Feb. 20 newsletter to constituents, Richardson wrote that the state plans to reallocate more than $70 million from other pools of money in order to close its widening budget gap. Some of those are funds that would have ended up in county coffers, Richardson wrote, including $2 million of video lottery funds and 911 call center funds.
But during a Friday, March 20 telephone interview, Richardson said that has changed somewhat.
“I was able to impress on the (Ways & Means) co-chairs the need to have less drastic cuts in the last four months of the biennium, so they agreed to restore some of the cuts and take money from other pools,” Richardson said.
Despite that, Richardson said, counties should still brace for cuts.
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“It doesn’t matter much what was left the first time through, because before this process is done, the Legislature will be digging through the cushions on the capitol couches looking for quarters,” he said.
The state is currently facing a $4.4 billion shortfall for the 2009-11 biennium. Richardson stated in his March 20 newsletter that the Legislature will use some of Oregon’s $2.4 billion share of the federal stimulus package to close that gap.
Of that, $1.62 billion consists of direct aid, and the other $800 million consists of Medicaid and other health payments to be distributed during the next biennium, Richardson wrote.
According to Richardson, the Ways & Means co-chairmen are examining four possible budget scenarios involving across-the-board cuts from 15.7 to 20.9 percent.
“No program is safe from further deep cuts,” he said.
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