The Oklahoman’s Michael McNutt covered the remarks I made last week at a panel on the state budget crisis at the University of Central Oklahoma’s Southwest Business Symposium. My conclusions were rather stark:

“We’ve been able to avoid the apocalypse up until now,” David Blatt, director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, a state policy think tank, said. “If we’re going to avoid a sort of catastrophe, we need additional revenue to close that gap,” Blatt said…

The magnitude of the budget crisis that is being faced for the upcoming budget year is only beginning to be grasped. In short:  the Board of Equalization has certified just over $5.415 billion in available state dollars for FY ’11. That is $1.55 billion less than this year’s revised budget after the mid-year cuts that were made to bring the budget into balance. Assuming the state uses an additional 3/8ths of the Rainy Day Fund and the remaining available federal stimulus dollars, that still leaves a gap approaching $800 – $850 million, according to our calculations. This gap is equivalent to 12 percent deeper cuts across all agencies of state government above the cuts already enacted the past two years. The actual  gap may be somewhat lower, if the full balance of the Rainy Day Fund is used and if additional federal Medicaid matching dollars materialize as hoped, but the prospect of deep cuts next year looms large. This outlook has been confirmed in recent pronouncements by Senate Pro Tem Glenn Cofee and other legislative leaders. Read the rest of this entry »