Budget Announcement

January 18, 2010 - Annapolis, Maryland

(As Prepared)

 

Thank you all for you joining us today,…

In a couple moments we’re going to begin a powerpoint presentation on our Administration’s FY2011 budget proposal, but first I want to give you a brief overview. 

As you know, three years ago we inherited a $1.7 billion structural deficit.

We came together not as Democrats and Republicans but as One Maryland, and instead of making excuses, we insisted on making progress.  How?  By making tough decisions.  By choosing fiscal responsibility and cutting $4.6 billion in state spending, while reforming, revitalizing, and  strategically reducing the size of our State government by 3,300 positions.

None of these choices have been easy choices, but they have been the right choices for families, for our future, and for our shared effort to create the conditions conducive to creating and preserving jobs, expanding opportunity, and protecting our hardworking families. 

Every year for the past three years, we have submitted – and the General Assembly has passed – a budget which comes in under spending affordability guidelines.   The budget we are proposing this year does as well. 

It will bring our four year totals to $5.6 billion in spending and 3,500 position reductions. 

For the first time in at least 40 years, general fund spending today is less than it was four years ago, and this year’s budget proposal would bring general fund spending for FY2011 down lower than FY2010.   And at -2.9%, spending as measured by Spending Affordability standards, would be the lowest in Maryland’s history.

During the past three years, restoring fiscal responsibility has been what’s allowed us to make progress for job creation, progress for education, progress for college affordability, progress for renewable energy, progress for our environment, progress for public safety.

With this budget, we seek the same sort of progress toward the priorities we share: strengthening and growing the ranks of our increasingly diverse, upwardly mobile middle class; improving public safety and public education in every part of our state; expanding opportunity – the opportunity to learn, to earn, and to enjoy the health of the people we love and the environment which sustains life itself.

The budget proposal seeks to allow us to create the conditions conducive to creating jobs, saving jobs, expanding economic opportunity, and protecting homeownership, hardworking families, and small and family owned businesses.

It includes, for example,  a proposed $5.7 billion investment in our #1 ranked public schools that will amount to an increase in $1.2 billion over four years, and $250 million for school construction that will both support construction jobs today and prepare our children to compete for the jobs of tomorrow.

Let’s begin our powerpoint and go into some further detail...

 

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