Budget writers: Slice $488M

By JIM DAVENPORT
Associated Press Writer

COLUMBIA – House and Senate budget writers agreed Friday the state’s $7 billion budget must be cut by $488 million, with the heaviest toll falling on health and higher education and the lightest on classrooms, children’s Medicaid programs and prisons.

The House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees met simultaneously Friday to lay out the sweeping changes to a budget that went into effect in July and immediately faced problems as the nation’s economy slowed.

The Legislature returns to Columbia on Monday to take up the committees’ legislation that calls for the emergency budget cutting.

Lawmakers have said all week they would try to blunt cuts for classrooms, the state’s Medicaid program and prisons and place the harshest cuts of nearly 15 percent on most of the state’s colleges and a raft of other state agencies.

For the most part, the cuts recommended Friday follow the outlines agencies have said for months they would use.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Cooper could offer no estimate of how many jobs would be lost. But all state workers may expect to see unpaid time off from their jobs as the budget plan gives agencies wide discretion in furloughing workers.

Cooper said some other states, such as California, Florida and Georgia, face even bigger budget problems. That “doesn’t give us much comfort, but we’re not the only state in this situation,” Cooper said.

In the Senate office building next door, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Hugh Leatherman offered an answer to the question on everyone’s mind.

“Where did the money go? Let me tell you where the money went,” Leatherman, R-Florence, told his committee. He ticked off a list of about $500 million in tax breaks, including eliminating the state’s grocery sales tax and trimming small business and individual income taxes. “If we had that today, we wouldn’t be in this room today.”

Nonetheless, talk of raising taxes never came up in the Senate Finance Committee’s debate. And when state Rep. Ken Kennedy, D-Greeleyville, asked House committee members if anyone had considered eliminating some of the tax breaks the state can no longer afford, the members shouted back, “No!”

South Carolina’s Education Department will lose more than $88.5 million, or 3 percent of its overall state funding, as it continues dealing with a cash shortfall of more than $100 million from a penny sales tax that pays for education improvement programs like gifted, after school and summer school programs.

Legislators also approved pumping about $19.4 million into the Education Department to head off a deficit that would have left buses without enough fuel to get children to school. That cash was stripped from a conservation grant program and Department of Motor Vehicles surpluses.

While the state’s Department of Health and Human Services would take an overall cut of 8 percent or $77 million, the agency got flexibility to use $52 million in reserves to cover part of that. However, the department would have to keep money intact for a children’s health insurance program and not cut spending on payments to doctors or for teen pregnancy and abstinence education programs.

Legislators proposed eliminating more than $8 million held in a competitive grant program that Gov. Mark Sanford has repeatedly railed against because it helps pay for parades, festivals and other local projects. That money would be used to help the Department of Corrections cover what’s grown to be a $12 million deficit in running the state’s prisons.

But colleges, technical schools and state museums and libraries weren’t nearly as lucky, as their spending was targeted for a total cut of $127 million. That would mean hefty losses at Clemson University, the Medical University of South Carolina and the University of South Carolina, each of which would lose 14.9 percent of its budget.

At USC, that comes to $26.9 million; at Clemson, $16.5 million and at MUSC, $14.2 million. The state’s technical college system gives up more than 14 percent too, with a $25 million cut.

“In terms of who got stabbed, we at higher ed got stabbed a lot deeper than K through 12,” said Rep. Chip Limehouse, a Charleston Republican overseeing college spending on the Ways and Means Committee.

Legislators also recommended taking $10 million from a college research fund to help pay for more Life Scholarships, one of the state’s top achievement awards for students getting good grades in high school.

There was a minor difference in the two plans to cut spending. The Senate wouldn’t go along with House plans to save money by cutting out some public school testing.

Sanford said he was pleased with his first glance at the plans, particularly doing away with the competitive grants program and state-paid security for the Confederate submarine Hunley now being conserved at a North Charleston lab. Still, Sanford said the proposal falls short on cutting what he called an “unfathomable waste of money” on enhanced Statehouse security.

Overall, Cooper didn’t expect the plans to sit well with the public.

“I hope you have a good weekend and you might want to unplug your phones,” he told members.