This week’s news that the state of Kansas finished the fiscal year with a $338 million revenue shortfall will reverberate for the rest of the upcoming year, and raises the possibility that Gov. Sam Brownback may be forced to order unpopular “allotment” cuts before the November election.

Meanwhile, Rep. Paul Davis of Lawrence, the Democrat challenging Brownback for re-election, wasted no time Monday in jumping on the issue, announcing even before the revenue numbers were announced that he wants to delay implementing the next wave of scheduled tax cuts, which he says are largely to blame for the state’s fiscal woes.

The news Monday was that state revenues came up $338 million short of expectations for Fiscal Year 2014. Going forward, that means if revenues actually meet their targets from here on out — something that even the Legislature’s own independent Research Department says is now in doubt — the state will finish the new fiscal year next June with just $27 million in the bank, a razor-thin margin in relation to the overall $6.3 billion general fund budget.

That means if anything happens in the coming months costing more than $27 million, it would put the state in the hole by the end of the year. And since the Kansas Constitution doesn’t allow the state to end a year with a negative balance, the governor would then be obligated by statute to order budget cuts known as “allotments” to bring the budget into balance.

That happened several times during fallout from the Great Recession, under both Democratic Gov. Mark Parkinson and Gov. Brownback, a Republican.

Here are just a couple of things that could happen before Election Day to force that much of an increase:

• Continued monthly revenue shortfalls: Brownback administration has insisted the shortfalls in April, May and June were a temporary anomaly, the result of changes in federal tax law that caused investors to sell off assets in 2012 before new, higher capital gains tax rates took effect in 2013.

In a June 9 memo, the Legislature’s own independent Research Department conceded that budget officials might have underestimated the impact of that change. But the research staff also conceded they may have low-balled the impact of the massive state tax cuts that were enacted in 2012 and 2013.

• School funding: Forget about the school finance lawsuit. Even if the District Court panel presiding over that case orders a big increase in school spending, that decision will be appealed to the Supreme Court, which would likely take at least another year to resolve. The immediate issue concerning schools is how many students will enroll this year, and how much will the state have to pay for base per-pupil aid, along with equalization aid for capital outlay and local option budgets.

At the time this year’s budget was adopted, though, nobody really knew what the total enrollment would be for the 2014-2015 school year. Nor did they know where local districts would set their local option budgets and capital outlay budgets. And because the Kansas Supreme Court just ordered the Legislature to restore equalization aid to its statutory levels, there is reason to believe more districts will raise their budgets to take advantage of that increased aid.

The bottom line is, it wouldn’t take a very large enrollment increase, coupled with several districts raising their discretionary budgets, to force an increase of at least $27 million.

• Social service budgets: After K-12 education, the next big expense item in the state budget — and one over which the governor and Legislature have only limited control — is spending on social service programs such as Medicaid, foster care, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and a host of other programs.

The federal government pays the lion’s share for most of those programs, but the overall cost is driven by population — the number of people who qualify for services at any given time. As the population ages and more elderly people qualify for nursing home care or in-home services, and as the population of children and adults with disabilities climbs, the cost of those programs goes up as well.

For the new fiscal year, the state projects the total cost of those programs at $2.7 billion, including $1 billion from the state general fund. Therefore, it would only take a 2.7 percent increase in the cost of those programs to put the state general fund under water.

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