Hot off the Presses: Our FY '12 budget highlights

With the 2011 legislative session now wrapped up, we are pleased to release our FY ’12 Budget Highlights, a one-page summary analysis of the budget for the upcoming year, along with eight detailed charts and tables on revenues and appropriations.

A couple of the notable charts are excerpted below.

The state’s annual appropriated budget for FY ’12 is $6.511 billion. This is the third straight year of decreased funding for state agencies; total appropriations for next year will be $250 million less than in FY ’07.Of total appropriations, 89.2 percent, or $5.811 billion, will go to the ten largest agencies in the core areas of education, health care, human services, public safety and corrections, with all the remaining appropriated agencies – 68 of them –  dividing up the remaining 10.8 percent ($699 million). This pattern of roughly 9 out of 10 appropriated dollars going to the ten largest agencies is long-standing and consistent; last year, as we showed here, the ten largest agencies received 89.5 percent of state funding.Click here for a table comparing the share of the total budget for each of the top agencies the past two years.

Our message on this year’s budget has been laid out in this blog post and this op-ed.  In short:

The agreement shows that legislative leaders and the Governor worked to minimize the damage, especially where cuts in state funding would have entailed a corresponding loss of federal matching funds…  However, this agreement is not cause for celebration. State agencies are now facing a third consecutive year of funding reductions and budget cuts, which will continue to corrode their ability to perform their core missions…. This outcome was not inevitable. Those who negotiated the budget will say they played the best hand possible given the cards they were dealt. However, we must recognize that a choice was made not to play with all the cards in the deck. Their decisions not to put serious revenue options on the table and to allow a cut in the top income tax rate to take effect seriously constrained what could be done to limit the magnitude of funding cuts.

We hope you will take a look at the FY ’12 Budget Highlights and share copies with others who may find it of interest. You can also click here for all our latest budget fact sheets and issue briefs, here for our budget blog posts, and here for our comprehensive Online Budget Guide.