NEWS . . . FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thursday, March 20, 2008
From: Martin Hawley, the Office of State Representative Calvin Hill

Daily View From The Hill:

Calvin Hill

Passing A Sensible, Balanced Budget

Today is the first day of Spring and we are still battling the budget between the House and Senate. Last night the House Appropriations Committee passed out the 2009 budget with some fantastic revisions.

As we believe that all state employees, including our school teachers and public safety officers, work very hard for what they do, we reversed the Governor’s idea of reducing their pay increases for next year and gave them back the full amount first recommended. We will not cut the budget on the backs of our hard working and loyal employees!

We were even able to restore most all of the equalization funding for schools and give additional raises to some of our law enforcement personnel that have been underpaid for so long.

This has eliminated some pet projects throughout the state, but we must, by law, balance the budget to the Governor’s guess at the revenue. We chose to do it on dubious projects and programs rather than cut critical services and employees.

Now, if we can figure a way to make sure that the Senate and Governor do not try to take away this funding from the schools, teachers and other state employees, then we will have done our primary job for the year – pass a sensible balanced budget to continue the operations of your state government for one more year.