Budget Issues (Audio)

Air Date:02/12/2010

By Jenifer Jones

Governor Mike Rounds says the legislature could have less money to work with than originally planned. Rounds says he expected fiscal year 2010 to be down 3.2 percent from 2009. He says based on Christmas sales, collections are now projected to be down 6.2 percent. Rounds says the legislature isn't basing the new budget on these numbers yet, because there is still another month of data to add before projections are finalized for the coming year. He says overall, it's a note of caution. 

"The revenues are not there yet, this recession clearly is not over," Rounds says. "We have not bottomed out yet, and we really won't see a recovery until the number of people that are back at work starts to increase, and we're not seeing that yet."

Rounds says one of the biggest issues continues to be sales and use tax. He says the revenues collected for 2010 were nearly $18 million less than actual revenues for 2009.

Rounds says he's still asking the legislature to not spend more than $32 million from the reserve funds for fiscal year 2011.

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