Governor Ready To Drop New Budget Proposal Into Mix

Governor Phil Bredesen announced on Wednesday a new version of next year’s budget.

The Governor says he came up with the new budget after failing to reach an agreement over a proposed cigarette tax with Senate Republicans. Bredesen has been calling for a .40 cent tax hike, while Republicans have questioned raising taxes during a year with surpluses.

Governor Bredesen says he didn’t budge from increasing the cigarette tax, but he did compromise on the timing of such a tax.

“What we’re going to propose is that we phase it in over two years, .25 cents the first year going to .40 the second year.”

The tax increase would fund the Governor’s proposal to change the state’s school funding formula. Earlier yesterday, House Republicans proposed a budget with no tax increases. House Minority Leader Jason Mumpower.

“We’re showing that there is a stark difference between House Republicans and House Democrats, and that we believe, particularly in a year when – I mean, come on…$1.5 billion of new, available revenue. When is enough going to be enough?”

The House GOP proposal does not fully fund the Governor’s changes to school funding, though it does increase education spending. Their budget proposal also lowers the tax on food.

State legislators will have the Governor’s new budget proposal next week.

WEB EXTRA: House Democratic Leader Gary Odom of Nashville criticized the Republican plan as refusing to recognize the importance of improving education and beefing up state employees’ salaries.

“I think they proposed a one percent increase for state employees, and I think that’s outrageous. I think that when you look at the things that we’ve been talking about doing, and funding as much of the governor’s education enhancements as we can, this year and over the next couple of years, for them to take the approach they’re taking, when we’re looking at doing something substantial for state employees, we’re looking at reinstating the road fund, when we’re looking at increasing the number of DAs, and public defenders.”

Odom also says health issues by themselves are important.

“We are trying to fund and make a dramatic change in the way we do education in this state, and I think the governor has thrown those choices out there to us. And it’s, the education portion of it is funded through the cigarette tax, we have one of the lowest in the country. The polling from many organizations shows that our citizens understand that we have the largest number of children smoking, we have the fastest growing number of children smoking. We know the health care consequences; we’re paying $2 billion a year to deal with that. And yet we can increase our tax to where we would probably be half the national average, and make some substantial increases in the way we fund and the way we do education in this state. And they’re saying we don’t need it.”