State government inceases cash revenues by $1.2 billion, cuts millions from services

Indiana now has cash reserves of more than $1.2 billion after budget cuts, Indiana’s state auditor, Tim Berry, said in a press release.

But the Indiana House Minority Leader, B. Patrick Bauer; D-South Bend, questioned the cost to state services.

Despite receiving about 5 percent less revenue than was expected, the state was able to increase the state’s reserves by approximately $400 million during the past fiscal year due to budget cuts, according to the statement.

“Without raising taxes and by carefully watching spending, Indiana state government has continued to live within its means,” Berry said.

He gave Gov. Mitch Daniels most of the credit for the increase in the state’s reserves. “Daniels has made fiscal accountability one of the hallmarks of his time as governor, and the results speak for themselves.”

But Bauer called the increase in reserves a result of “gimmicks” and said they are having a negative impact on Indiana’s public services.

“It is prudent to wonder at the cost extracted by these gimmicks,” he said. “What services are suffering as a result of the obsessive need to maintain a $1 billion
surplus?”

Particularly worrying to Bauer is the effect on Indiana’s education system.
“Our schools have paid a heavy price already,” he said. He bemoaned Indiana’s public school systems’ loss of “hundreds of millions of dollars in state support cut at the governor’s demand.”

He also referred negatively to Daniels’ signature education reform program that was passed earlier this year, which creates a state private school voucher program, among  other things.

“Now they will lose even more funding as this administration pursues its grand social experiment to gut public schools in favor of private programs and schools available only to a select few,” Bauer said.

Because of the difficult economic recession, during the past fiscal year, Daniels’ administration cut approximately $325 million from the state K-12 public school system, about $24 million from state universities, about $3 million from state grants for poor college students and hundreds of millions of dollars from other state agencies.

Berry praised state employees and agencies for weathering these cuts.

“The real heroes of this budget year, however, are the state agencies and their employees who combined to return hundreds of millions of taxpayer money to the
treasury,” he said.

— Zach Ammerman