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Legislative committee looking for ‘broader structural changes’ within state budget

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — As much asĀ $300 million will have to be found to fill the projected shortfall in next year’s West Virginia budget, a number that could grow before the start of the new fiscal year in July, according to analysts.

House Majority Leader Daryl Cowles (R-Morgan, 58)

Those projections mean more budget reductions will be necessary after years of repeated cuts to state government.

Because of that, “We need to reinvent and rethink government about how we can change it to be ‘right-sized’ to what our state can afford right now,” said House Majority Leader Daryl Cowles (R-Morgan, 58), co-chair of the Legislature’s Joint Government Accountability, Transparency and Efficiency Committee.

Cowles was a guest on Tuesday’s MetroNews “Talkline” talking about the work of the GATE Committee which met for the first time at the State Capitol earlier this month and is expected to meet again during September interims for lawmakers, scheduled for Sept. 18 to 20.

The bipartisan group of nine senators and nine delegates is charged with developing a package of budget reductions to be presented to the full Legislature for consideration when the 2017 Regular Legislative Session begins in February after a new governor takes office.

“What I’m hoping this committee can do is take a look at the broader structural changes we can make to government,” Cowles said of what he considers a better alternative than being “stuck in that situation where — are you cutting across-the-board or are you cutting programs?”

Following much debate, about $45 million was trimmed from the final budget for the current fiscal year that began on July 1 while new revenues were generated through additional tobacco taxes, including a 65 cent per pack hike to the state tax on each pack of cigarettes.

During the last three years, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin has cut $400 million from the base budget of more than $4 billion using across-the-board reductions.

“We’re in a period of transition so, yeah, certainly we’re going to cut and sweep, but what we’re looking at, I think, is overlapping programs and consolidating programs and deciding what can we do better to get a better value out of each program,” Cowles said.

“Going in there with a meat cleaver and hacking off parts of programs, it’s tough to do.”

In July, the first month of the current fiscal year, the state Department of Revenue reported tax collections were $32.6 million below estimates, largely due to sales tax collections that finished $22 million under projections.





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