The annual week-long event is implemented by the Energy and Environment Cabinet (EEC) and kicks off the Great American Cleanup, spanning from March through May. Its purpose is to provide Kentucky communities with an opportunity to “spring clean,” recycle and promote personal responsibility across the Commonwealth.  Thousands give their time to numerous cleanup projects, picking up litter and trash from our roadways, valley and streams, and recycling where possible.

Kentucky.gov: – Commonwealth Cleanup Week

FRANKFORT – Someone once called writing a budget ‘a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions.’ That Kentucky state government faces continued hard times is a good bit more than a suspicion.

But March, with a budget actually emerging from mainly talk to real numbers in a real bill, brings us the real math of the Commonwealth’s two-year fiscal future — at least the math as it now stands at this coalescing stage of the budget process.

The House put pen to paper this week and passed its spending plan Wednesday. That was 50 calendar days after the governor handed off his own proposal to the Legislature, in a near-grisly Budget Address Jan. 17. There are, at this writing Friday, 16 working days left for the Senate to put its own stamp on the bill and leave time for the two chambers to come together in conference committee for a final reckoning.

The House version of the budget pretty closely reflects the proposal the governor sent up in January, a budget he called ‘inadequate for the needs of our people,’ reflecting a fiscal situation he described, memorably, as ‘wretched.’

House leaders conceded early on there wasn’t much wiggle room for improvement, considering the money bind Kentucky finds itself in. That’s in contrast with previous years, even difficult ones, when the Legislature could see at least some daylight in the budget picture. Just two years ago, after the governor proposed a dead-on-arrival budget that assumed revenues from an expanded-gaming proposal with no realistic prospects that session, the House basically tossed that budget and started from scratch.

No such running room was apparent to House budget writers this year. One indicator of 2012’s fiscal straitjacket was the limited and even subdued debate the bill got on the House floor before it passed 78-17.

State agencies and programs have undergone 10 rounds of spending cuts totaling 25-30 percent since the Great Recession settled over Kentucky and the nation like a gray mist in 2007. This year, with a budget said to start $742 million in the hole, they face more. (Just an aside: State revenues have shown encouraging signs of turnaround recently; but not enough to offset the loss of one-time revenues like federal stimulus dollars used to stanch the bleeding the last three years).

Even after dipping into the Rainy Day Fund, scrambling to find other fund transfers, and counting on an amnesty program to recover millions in unpaid taxes, House budget drafters were looking at a shortfall that they say (agreeing with the governor) requires 8.4 percent cuts to most agencies, a 6.4 percent cut to higher education, and a 4.5 percent cut to many areas of education  — although SEEK, the basic funding formula for Kentucky schools, is spared an actual cut. But even SEEK will not fully keep pace because of projected growth in student population, and will as a practical matter fall back to 2008 levels.

Corrections is spared. So is Medicaid. But separate budgets for the legislative and judicial branches take the full 8.4-percent whack.

The tax amnesty program, also passed by the House Wednesday in a separate bill, would remove penalties for tens of thousands of delinquent taxpayers, and also forgive half the interest on what they owe if they come forward and pony up. Proponents say it could raise $55 million or more. There’s historical justification for thinking so. Statewide amnesty was last offered ten years ago, and raked in $40 million. An earlier and even more successful program in 1988 netted over $60 million.

The House did make several relatively modest changes to the Administration’s overall budget proposal, including dropping about $450 million in university bonds. It also put state retirees in the same boat with state employees, with neither getting cost-of-living raises the next two years. The governor had left the retiree COLA in.

The House did restore funding for some key education initiatives, including after-school programs, social-service programs and gifted and talented programs. And there is actually some new spending, including money to reduce social-worker caseloads, allow more people with severe disabilities to live in non-institutional settings, and cover more burial services for Kentucky’s veterans. Additionally, the House plan authorizes the planned construction of a fourth state veterans nursing home.

As a practical matter, and in horsy terms Kentuckians understand, House passage of a budget is racing in the backstretch, important but not decisive. The Senate must still act, and will surely have its own ideas.

But even Senate passage will just mark the turn for home. Then there’s a long, wearying stretch run, where things are settled with finality.

A conference committee of House and Senate leaders will, line-by-line, work their way through chamber differences, try to arrive at a bottom-line compromise, and ship the bill and its hundreds of pages downstairs to the governor. He may then sign it, veto it, or veto specific parts of it in what’s called a ‘line-item’ veto. Even then, the General Assembly retains a Constitutional right to override any or all of his objections.

To finish the metaphor, we’re still some distance from the finish line. But the end is now in sight. And odds are the ‘suspicion’ that Kentucky has lean days ahead will be confirmed in a budget that, given hard unyielding reality, is simply the best good people can do.

For more information, contact scott.payton@lrc.ky.gov

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