Agencies Present Lower Budgets To Appropriations
Air Date:02/03/2011
By Kealey Bultena
Lawmakers working on South Dakota’s budget are halfway through testimony from state.
Appropriations leaders say they have heard from seventeen agencies, and fourteen are left to testify. Republican Senator Corey Brown says the departments are presenting budgets scaled back by ten percent.
"If an agency came before us and said they were going to take a ten percent cut, and it wasn’t going to affect any of their services and it wasn’t going to affect anything else in the future, I think we’d probably have concerns that perhaps they were overbudgeted in the previous years," Brown says. "When we talk about ten percent cuts, and we tend to run a pretty lean government in the state in many areas, I think these agencies have come forward and have been pretty honest about what the impact of that cut is going to be."
Brown says not all agencies know how they will cut spending, but that’s because new department leaders are still transitioning and looking for places to save.
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