Maryland Senate President Thomas Mike Miller continues to pressure Gov. Martin O?Malley to find new tax revenues this year, but the new chief executive and other lawmakers are apparently satisfied with a go-slow approach.
“This time next year, the Senate?s going to be in turmoil,” Miller told his fellow senators. “We?re going to be in crisis. We?ll have a summer session.”
He said the governor had enough in the rainy-day fund this year to “patch together the budget.”
“But the following year, all hell?s going to break loose,” Miller said. He supports a sales tax increase, a proposal that passed the House three years ago.
O?Malley has persistently resisted any talk of tax increases this year, despite looming deficits, and promised to be looking at more efficiencies in government. On Wednesday, he told state and local officials seeking more school funds that there needs to be “a leap of faith that we?re going to get our fiscal house in order in the years ahead.”
Most leaders of the House and Senate have said they support a study of the complete revenue picture this year. “We need to initiate some kind of study now,” said Del. Norman Conway, chairman of the Appropriations Committee. “We?ve known since the implementation of Thornton [education aid] that we didn?t put a funding source in there.”
O?Malley is “trying to be deliberative about it, and not immediately come in to be the tax-and-spend guy,” Conway said.
The governor may have boxed himself into either heavy cost-cutting or tax increases in fiscal 2009.He has tapped most of the state?s rainy-day fund to pay for the increases in this year?s budget, and he has ruled out the other measures that Gov. Robert Ehrlich had relied on to fill in deficits in his first two years.
Those include taking money out of the transportation trust fund, using money set aside for Program Open Space, and cutting funding to the university system, which resulted in tuition increases. O?Malley has promised to give the university and colleges enough money to freeze tuition.
