AUGUSTA – With 21 days remaining in the current fiscal year, the Baldacci administration announced Monday it had identified yet another hole in the state budget that could run as high as $15.5 million.

Fortunately, Maine is scheduled to receive about $115 million in federal tax relief funds in the coming weeks and the governor plans to use a portion of it to erase the deficit.

“We can use part of the Medicaid money set aside under those funds for this,” said Lee Umphrey. a spokesman for Gov. John E. Baldacci. “And I think [the tax relief program] indicates the federal government anticipated that states would be in situations where fiscal relief was necessary.”

But Sen. Karl Turner, R-Cumberland, said that since the Baldacci administration still lacked a final figure on the depth of the budget gap, the governor may have to draw down money from other sources to balance the state’s books.

“Yes, they can use federal Medicaid money for that purpose, but it has been verbally earmarked for Dirigo Health and Maine Rx Plus – so something will have to give,” he said.

Meeting Monday afternoon with members of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, Peter Walsh, the acting commissioner of the Department of Human Services, said the budget gap was identified early Saturday morning.

“We still don’t have a final figure, but we have discovered we have a potential deficit in the range of $12 million to $15.5 million,” he said. “But I believe it’s going to be less than that, even though the jury is out on a couple of accounts. … I cannot give you a figure today as to what that will be.”

In breaking down the deficit for lawmakers, Walsh explained state expenditures for Medicaid had run over budget estimates and that drug company rebates had declined while the federal courts weighed the Healthy Maine Prescription Drug Program. Additionally, Walsh said the largest chunk of the deficit – $6.5 million – was attributed to the federal government’s refusal to fund a state Medicaid waiver request for Maine’s Drugs for the Elderly program.

Walsh said the deficit may also be reduced through federal reimbursements that have yet to be received by the state. Other accounts that could wind up with lapsed surplus balances when the fiscal year ends on June 30 will further defray the final figure.

“Why did this happen?” Walsh said. “We had been hearing from a number of individuals in the budget office that they thought the Medicaid program was going to be short this year and we took those suggestions and pieces of advice seriously. But every time we heard that, we didn’t get anything specific. It was more of an analysis of what we expected to come in, versus what we expected to go out. Right up until [Saturday morning] I thought we were going to make it and end the year in the black. Then we stepped back and decided to take a different approach to this thing. When we did, it made us realize that we were not going to make it.”

Rep. Peter Mills, R-Cornville, said he was not surprised that the department was posting a Medicaid shortfall because he had long suspected that the strict levels of precision the administration and the Legislature relied upon when initially calculating the DHS budget for two years was overly ambitious.

“These programs just don’t lend themselves to that point of precision,” he said.

The federal funds expected to help cover the Maine deficit are part of $20 billion in new aid to states included in President Bush’s $350 billion tax cut package passed by Congress last month. State officials are estimating Maine will see an increase of about $65.6 million in Medicaid funding and about $50 million in other aid that can be used for any general purpose.