Kansas’ projected budget shortfall shrank from about $1 billion to about $900 million, after a key biannual revenue analysis predicted better than anticipated tax receipts last week.
As The Topeka Capital-Journal reports, members of the state’s consensus revenue group offered cautiously optimistic projections that followed multiple downward revisions in recent years.
Even though it narrows the budget gap by about $100 million, the figure doesn’t include additional spending on public schools following March’s Kansas Supreme Court ruling that the state’s K-12 funding was unconstitutional, which could result in hundreds of millions of dollars more being directed to schools in the next few years.
Kansas also had faced a nearly $300 million budget shortfall in the current fiscal year ending June 30, which lawmakers and Gov. Sam Brownback resolved this month by digging into a long-term investment fund. In the current and next fiscal year, the state will take about $360 million from that fund.