"Not Me" Continues, is Beshear in Charge?
The Cabinet formerly known as Commerce weighs in on why they should be exempt from 4% cuts:
Sparrow and Wilder held a news briefing Tuesday to outline the impact on their budgets if the state received no new revenue and if their current budgets were cut by 4 percent. Briefings by other state officials are to continue this week.
Sparrow, whose cabinet has a $51 million General Fund budget with about 2,400 employees, said she didn’t know how many parks would have to close if there were no new revenue but said the number could be “rather significant.” Kentucky has 52 state parks, of which 17 are resorts.
She also said the 300 or so layoffs in her cabinet would involve full-time as well as seasonal employees.
Under a 4 percent – or $875,000 — cut, she said, the eight welcome centers across the state on interstate highways may close two days a week but their rest rooms will remain open.
Which sounds like alot of people to layoff to find $2 million (4% of $51 million).
Today, the Justice Cabinet will present:
Justice and Public Safety Secretary J. Michael Brown and Energy and Environment Secretary Len Peters are to hold briefings about their budgets at 9 a.m. Wednesday.
The Governor proposed 4% cuts on top of a impossible to pass tax increase, and is now lining up his agencies to explain why he shouldn't have the cuts, PR against his own proposal.
Beshear may recognize that cutting spending is what Kentuckians expect when the economy is poor, but someone should tell the rest of his government.
First he toured the state saying he didn't have any answers. When Beshear took a pay cut, he didn't ask the rest of his government to join him. Now his agencies are making his plan more difficult to enact. Maybe he isn't running the government...
