Topeka — Falling revenue, increasing costs, the threat of tax increases and cuts in essential services. Sound familiar?
It should. Kansas is in one of its worst state budget messes in decades and Gov. Bill Graves and the Legislature are fighting over ways to fix it.
But Kansas is not alone.
The recession and increased health-care costs have wasted state coffers nationwide.
"Practically no state has escaped unscathed," said Corina Eckl, who tracks state budgets for the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Forty-four states are seeing revenue fall below projections, and 21 of those, including Kansas, have expenditures over-budget, according to an NCSL report.
And most state legislatures are engaged in the same fight going on in Topeka whether to increase taxes or cut spending.
"States are looking at a whole host of alternatives," Eckl said.
For example, Alaska's Gov. Tony Knowles is pushing for a state income tax, legislators in Iowa are considering cutting the Medicaid reimbursement rates to doctors and nursing homes and Nebraska has a 50-cent cigarette tax increase on the table.
Many governors through executive orders shaved spending to give their states some breathing room as the legislative sessions started. Graves rejected doing that, saying that cuts in the current budget would have been too difficult to manage.
In Kansas, the lines have been drawn in attempts to bridge an estimated $426 million gap between revenue and expenditures during the next 18 months.
Graves kicked off the 2002 legislative session last week by proposing a quarter-cent increase in the state sales tax, a one-cent per gallon increase in the fuels tax, a 65-cent increase in the cigarette tax, and a three percent increase in the vehicle registration fee.
But many lawmakers, especially House members who face re-election this year, are opposed to the package.
Senate President Dave Kerr, R-Hutchinson, has offered a no-new-tax plan that would dip into reserves and make one-percent to two-percent cuts in state spending, including aid to public schools.
But just as many lawmakers don't want to go home facing angry parents and school boards.
Across the nation, lawmakers are looking at the same hard choices after years of unprecedented economic growth when they were able to increase spending and cut taxes at the same time.
But aside from a handful of states, Eckl said she didn't expect there would be any broad-based tax increases.
That seems to be the sentiment now in the Kansas Legislature.
Graves, a moderate Republican, saw his sales tax proposal attacked by conservative Republicans and Democrats as putting too much of a burden on low- and moderate-income Kansans during hard economic times. But the increase in the cigarette tax received a warmer reception.
Again, Eckl said, Kansas mirrors the nation as increases in cigarette taxes appear to be the least onerous politically because they also are supported by many health groups.
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