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By Lyle Hillyard
Senate Executive Appropriations Chair

On Friday, the Utah State Tax Commission released preliminary year-end revenue numbers.

When you look at the numbers, you will notice we're collecting less revenue than originally projected. That is not a surprise (we're actually pleased it's not worse). We're still within the range we predicted last month.

No one wants to be right about bad news but legislative dinosaurs like me have been through enough economic cycles that we felt the downturn coming and planned ahead for it. We have some carry-forward money, a healthy Rainy Day fund and we socked away an additional $100 M for the Uniform School Fund. In addition, we crafted a FY 2009 budget that is significantly lower than the FY 2008 budget.

From the article in the Salt Lake Tribune:

"We intentionally reserved a large carry-forward because we anticipated a slowdown," Valentine said. "Utah is very well poised to weather any kind of economic downturn."

Some states are having to cut services because of dwindling tax revenues, said State Tax Commission spokesman Charlie Roberts. "We're in a lot better fiscal shape than most," Roberts said, pointing to Utah's fiscally conservative bent and efforts to foster a favorable business climate as contributing factors.

So, we need to pay attention, spend carefully, and act wisely - but we don't need to be afraid. In keeping with being the best managed state in the nation we have already asked state agencies to plan ahead on where and how they can cut, should that become a necessity. I'm hoping it won't.

But we will keep watching. As further reports arrive (September and November) we will sit down and decide the exact best way to handle the budget. We will have final revenue numbers after the closing period this month. I expect to know our final FY 2008 balance after the Division of Finance closes-out expenditures at the beginning of September.

We've had three years of phenomenally healthy economic and governmental growth. It is probably not an unhealthy exercise to carefully scrutinize state spending and see if the money being spent needs to be reallocated to meet the areas of growth next session.

3 Comments:

 Anonymous said...

Did you get Bob Bernick's permission before you published this?

7/22/2008 12:19 PM  

 Anonymous said...

Yes, Lyle, but how are your tomatoes doing?

7/23/2008 1:28 PM  

 Nishantha said...

This post has been removed by the author.

7/24/2008 7:03 AM  

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