CA – Budget tight, Barbour warns
State department and agency heads who submitted a wish list of $1.2 billion above Mississippi’s 2010 spending plan are going to be sorely disappointed when the fiscal 2011 budget is approved some time next spring, Gov. Haley Barbour and Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant say.
During hearings before the Joint Legislative Budget Committee last week, department and agency heads asked for the additional $1.2 billion even as state revenue collections were dropping 13.8 percent in the first two months of the 2010 fiscal year that began July 1.
Barbour, who already has cut $172 million from this year’s budget, will huddle with the state’s top fiscal experts and submit his budget proposal for 2011 to legislators by Nov. 15.
Commercial Appeal
9/27/9
“I expect that my recommendations will, by necessity, be very different than what many state agencies requested during this week’s hearings,” Barbour wrote Friday in a letter to Bryant, House Speaker Billy McCoy, D-Rienzi, and the legislature’s two appropriations committee chairmen.
