A national economic meltdown has sucker-punched Maryland, according to state revenue numbers released yesterday portending major budget cuts in previously protected areas such as public safety, education and health care.
A grim-faced Gov. Martin O'Malley issued an executive order requiring about 67,000 state workers to take up to five days of unpaid leave, and he said a projected $1.9 billion revenue gap in next year's budget could require state worker layoffs.
O'Malley, a Democrat, said he and his budget officials were taken aback by the shortfalls in the state's income and sales tax revenues. After trimming $300 million from the current $14 billion state operating budget earlier this year, O'Malley was preparing an additional $200 million in spending reductions. Now, he said, he will have to find twice as many trims in an increasingly lean spending plan.
"This certainly is not a day of good news," O'Malley said after the state Board of Revenue Estimates issued projections that have plummeted since the last time they were revised, in September. For the budget year that began July 1, projections are down about $850 million from initial estimates, and off nearly $1 billion for the fiscal year starting July 2009.
O'Malley's summation was the rare understatement on a gray, rainy day that had Annapolis leaders reaching for inflated rhetoric to match the fiscal calamity they will have to wrestle with in coming months.
Comptroller Peter Franchot called the numbers "devastating." Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp said Maryland was being "battered by the forces of a national recession," which David F. Roose, the state's chief revenue forecaster, said "will rival the worst of the postwar period."
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, a member of the General Assembly since 1971, said that the budget will increase next year at the lowest rate since he's been in office, and perhaps in more than a century. "Nobody anticipated the size of this recession. I mean people have been in denial now for five and six months," Miller said. "It's going to be longer and much deeper than anybody could have possibly indicated."
Maryland's fiscal situation reflects the recession that began at the end of last year. At least 43 states have wrestled with or are facing budget shortfalls, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
"We are where we are because we are a little state in a big world," said Warren G. Deschenaux, the General Assembly's chief budget analyst.
