Goetz Holds Closed Door Briefing on Budget Numbers

The state finance commissioner briefed House Democrats Tuesday on lowered expectations for revenue. The representatives closed their meeting to the public to take the bad news.

Finance Commissioner Dave Goetz says he doesn’t yet have hard numbers on the budget the administration is expected to present to lawmakers later this week, but the trend is down.

“A lot of the reality of this is just that as you get down to budget, it settles in with people. So there’s just a good bit of, kind of, I don’t know if grieving is the right word, but, a certain amount of … just discussion and understanding of kind of the situation that goes on.”

April was the 14th straight month of slumping sales tax revenue in Tennessee, and the state funding board projected that the general fund, after shrinking roughly 10 percent this year, may slip another point next year.

Nashville Democrat Mike Turner says it’s a serious situation that will take all groups working together to craft a budget.

“This new information that has come out of the funding board is really disastrous to the whole plan we’ve had all year long. I mean, we thought we could get through the next year. And we’re trying to figure out now, what to do.”

The discussion might return to laying off state employees. Turner says that may be inevitable.

He also says lawmakers are considering new ideas, but wouldn’t go into specifics, except to say no state income tax.

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Mike Turner closed Tuesday’s meeting of the House Democratic Caucus to the press, sending reporters out of the room. He says part of his concern is strategic. He listed the groups that have to work together to finish a budget.

“ … we’re gonna have to work with the Senators, you know, with the Republicans in the Senate, and the Democrats in the Senate, and our counterparts [Republicans] here in the House, to come up with something we can all kind of live with. Because there’s no clear-cut, slam dunk group in control right now, and this, this is serious stuff.”

Turner says lawmakers will look for ideas from the Bredesen administration but will continue to try to come up with something to help. But it wasn’t easy to explain what.

“We kicked some ideas around this meeting today. That’s kinda what we’re gonna…We’re trying to come up with some new ideas. I don’t think you’re going to see…I don’t know what you’re going to see out of this.”

“You’re obviously not going to see an income tax out of this, that’s not going to happen. You may see some other ideas come forward.”

On the potential for state layoffs, Turner says there may be no way around it.

“We’re going to try our best to avoid that, but I don’t, I don’t have an answer for that right now. It doesn’t look like, it doesn’t look like we can avoid it right now.”

Turner says he closed the meeting to the public because he didn’t want information from the session distributed by way of Internet postings and blogs within minutes. The quick briefing by the administration frankly caught him by surprise, he says.

“This started out to be a charter schools meeting that broke out into a budget fight…No. Not a budget fight, it wasn’t that. We were discussing the budget situation.”