Revision casts more positive light on Maine revenue outlook

AUGUSTA – Newly revised revenue projections presented a slightly less gloomy picture of the state’s finances Monday but offered no hope of a quick fix for a $48.7 million shortfall in the state’s two-year budget.

Now under review by the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, the $5 billion tax-and-spending package submitted in January by Gov. Angus S. King erased a then $253 million deficit between projected revenues and expenditures. The governor closed that gap through a combination of proposed tax increases and program cuts, and by proposing to refinance debt owed by the Maine State Retirement System.

The six members of the state Revenue Forecasting Committee added another $48.7 million to the deficit Monday, attributing the shortfall to declining sales taxes in the first half of this year.

Coming up $48.7 million short wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened to state finances. Late last week, state economists were projecting a minimum $58 million deficit that could have reached $100 million if personal income growth were to decline from 5 percent to 41/2 percent. Laurie Lachance, state economist, said Monday that new information on personal income taxes and a consensus of opinion on the committee that current revenue dips will not pervade the entire two-year budget cycle prompted the economists to revise their originally more pessimistic assessments.

“We wanted to reflect the current softness, without projecting that softness forward indefinitely,” she said. “We needed to get our arms around capturing the softness and how it will affect retail sales revenues without projecting hysterically forward that this softness is going to continue. Because we don’t believe it will.”

Monday’s committee decision was welcomed not only by the King administration, but also by legislative budget writers.

“Overall I am reasonably confident that [the committee’s] estimates are correct enough for our purposes,” said Sen. Jill Goldthwait, the independent lawmaker from Bar Harbor who is chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee.

Goldthwait’s committee is considering $160 million in additional requests from state departments and lawmakers. The committee’s work bogged down last week as the panelists awaited word on new revenue figures. Goldthwait said the forecasting committee’s decision to reject the higher revenue shortfall estimates left her panel in a better position to weigh funding requests.

“To be looking for $210 million instead of $280 million is a bit better,” she said.

About $11.4 million of the $48.7 million revenue losses will be felt in the current fiscal year that ends June 30. The Appropriations Committee has enough money on hand to cover that loss through anticipated unspent department balances. The challenge lies in bridging a $17.3 million gap in fiscal year 2002 and $20 million shortfall in fiscal year 2003.

“No matter how you account for it, we still have to find $48 million somewhere,” Goldthwait said.

The Hancock County senator said she felt her committee could start taking up some of the budget’s major spending areas such as educational funding, health care and business tax breaks now that lawmakers have some hard numbers on the revenue shortfall. The task of closing the $48.7 million gap was being studied Monday by Gov. Angus S. King, who pledged to work with the Legislature to find a solution. Janet Waldron, King’s finance commissioner, said she expects her staff to return to the Appropriations Committee next week with a list of possible remedies for the revenue shortfall.

King may be forced to consider dipping into the state’s $143 million Rainy Day Fund or enacting more aggressive tax increases than the 26-cent-per-pack hike on cigarettes or the half-percent increase on the meals and lodging tax.

“We’re looking at a number of different pieces,” Waldron said. “We’ll be running various tax models against other programs. But it will definitely be more than tweaking because $48 million is a significant amount of money. There will be some significant changes.”