State Must Curb Spending

State government has a severe spending problem that needs to be addressed through comprehensive performance audits to ensure that taxpayers are getting the most for their money.

State Comptroller Peter Franchot, in a visit to the Carroll County Times on Tuesday, said the state was in a “fiscal emergency.” This year the state patched budget holes with federal stimulus money, he said, but that money won’t be available next year and our budget problems will be.

“There’s a cliff coming in 2010 and we’re going to drop off it with a thud,” he said.

Franchot said that the state needs to go through its budget department by department in a series of performance audits to make sure that we are spending our tax dollars wisely.

“What are the citizens getting and is it a worthwhile investment,” he said.

Other states have seen cost savings by doing similar audits, and Maryland could see similar results.

“We need a top to bottom scrubbing of state spending,” he said.

The Comptroller is right.

A fiscal disaster was put off this year because of federal stimulus dollars. Franchot said he didn’t know how much of that money was going to create new jobs, but said it probably wasn’t much. Most was used only to put off cuts that would have had to have been made without the injection of federal money.

The federal money gives the state a little breathing room. Unfortunately, our lawmakers seem intent on squandering that extra time that could be used to complete performance audits that could help identify savings prior to next year’s legislative session.

That session promises to be more difficult. Experts say the economy may be rebounding, but they expect the recovery to be slow. Unemployment will also still be high next January, and state revenues likely will continue to be lower than projections.

So the state’s budget problems likely are going to get worse, and there probably isn’t going to be any federal stimulus money to soften the impact.

“We have to be very, very cautious because we have not seen the other shoe drop,” Franchot said. “The debt issue has not been resolved.”

The Governor and lawmakers in the Senate and House of Delegates should be listening to the Comptroller and using this time to identify savings through performance audits of state departments.

If they don’t, taxpayers will likely again be the ones carrying the burden next year when the state looks for ways to address the spending problems that it ignored in this legislative session.

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