Editorial: Budget alarm

The ever-widening hole in the state budget should be deeply concerning to every Kansan.

The Kansas Department of Revenue’s latest tax revenue report is nothing short of deeply concerning.

On Monday, the department announced that tax revenue collections in September came up $44.7 million short of budget expectations. It is the fifth consecutive month — and the 10th out of the last 12 — that revenues have fallen short of expectations. Basically, from the moment in May when Gov. Sam Brownback announced dramatic $97 million cuts in state spending to deal with an anticipated revenue shortfall, the shortfall has only gotten dramatically worse.

Kansas, already working with the smallest reserve balance of any state in the nation, had missed revenue expectations by a collective $57 million in the three reports after the $97 million in cuts were approved. The September shortfall means the state now has $101.7 million less than it thought it projected when the cuts were made. Put another way, if the state had known then what it knows now, the painful May cuts would have been twice as steep.

The state has already robbed transportation funding to balance the budget in the past. It has slashed higher education funding, including funding for the University of Kansas, significantly. KU and the state’s other regents universities are asking for no new revenue in 2017, just a restoration of the 4 percent funding cuts they took this year. When the state has dug a $100 million hole a quarter of the way into the fiscal year, the Board of Regents’ request seems like a pipe dream.

On Tuesday, a task force that Brownback appointed in June released a report recommending ways to improve the state’s revenue estimating process. Historically, revenue estimates have been prepared by the Consensus Revenue Estimating Group comprising officials from the Kansas Department of Revenue, the governor’s budget office, the Legislature’s nonpartisan research staff and economists from the University of Kansas, Kansas State University and Wichita State University. The group issues revenue projections in November that the governor uses in developing his budget proposal and revised estimates in April that the Legislature uses.

Such reforms are welcome. By all means, revising the system to ensure more accurate revenue estimates in the future is important.

But talking about revising the way revenues are projected at this point is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. More pressing is how the state is going to deal with this growing fiscal crisis. There are only two options facing the governor and Legislature in 2017: Either slash state spending even more or backtrack on the trickle-down tax cuts of 2012 and 2013. Neither is very appealing to the state’s taxpayers.