Revenue panel votes to defer action on General Fund forecast

AUGUSTA – The state’s Revenue Forecasting Committee, sending budget writers a warning, unanimously agreed Friday to put off for a month a formal reduction of its revenue estimates by $20 million for fiscal year 2007 and $16 million for fiscal years 2008-09.

With a report due by March 1, the six-member panel decided to defer any actual adjustments in its current forecast until after March 15, when businesses that use a calendar year for tax purposes face a deadline for submitting final returns to the state.

Maine Revenue Services chief analyst Michael Allen said the results of March 15 filings should become clear a week later.

Tax department analysts have cited weak business tax receipts as a reason for lowering estimated revenue on that tax line but have also said there is a chance the trend could turn around next month.

Viewed within the scope of the entire General Fund budget, $20 million is not an enormous number, but a revenue reduction of that size now – with the June 30 end of fiscal 2007 just more than four months away – would produce real headaches for Gov. John Baldacci and the Legislature.

It was just more than two weeks ago that lawmakers overwhelmingly affirmed a unanimous Appropriations Committee deal on a $127 million supplemental budget bill designed to fully cover unanticipated government costs for the current year.

Additionally, even a relatively small revenue reduction of just $16 million for the upcoming biennium – the two-year budget cycle that begins July 1 – could be enough to disrupt a tentative legislative timetable for work on Baldacci’s $6.4 billion budget package.

In part for political reasons, Democratic House and Senate leaders have been looking at the possibility of bringing a biennial budget bill up for voting before the end of March.

Having the Revenue Forecasting Committee put off a final report until late March could make it harder for lawmakers to stick to that tentative timetable.

Members of the Revenue Forecasting Committee include Chairman Jerome Gerard, who is acting state tax assessor, James Breece of the University of Maine System, Marc Cyr, an analyst with the Legislature’s Office of Fiscal and Program Review, State Budget Officer Ellen Jane Schneiter, Director Grant Pennoyer of the Office of Fiscal and Program Review and State Economist Catherine Reilly.

Late last year the panel boosted General Fund revenue projections through mid-2009 by nearly $270 million.

The forecasting committee met Friday as the Appropriations Committee, joined by members of the Health and Human Services Committee, was winding up a weeklong series of public hearings on the portions of the Baldacci biennial budget package dealing with human services.

Budget hearings on other elements of the package are scheduled to run into early March.