1% growth may
crimp state budgetLingle's money plan, due Monday,
focuses especially on prisons
The first state budget to have Republican Gov. Linda Lingle's fingerprints all over it goes to the Democratic-controlled Legislature on Monday, proposing about 2 percent more for the second year of the two-year, $7.5 billion general-fund budget approved in April.
Her budget, however, has the potential to be out of balance the same day it is announced.
The state's Council on Revenues, which in September forecast a 6.2 percent general-fund revenue growth in the current fiscal year, which began in July, meets Monday to review that forecast. It will take into account that through the first five months of the year, revenues have grown by only 1 percent.
Lingle, in an interview yesterday, declined to give details of her budget, pending its submission to the Legislature and a planned presentation to the news media Monday.
Lingle's budget request is expected to focus most of the additional spending on prisons and mental health programs to keep at bay the prospects of legal action that could result in federal court intervention.
"It's not where society wants to spend its money, and that makes it a challenge," she said. "You can understand why politicians don't like to spend money on prisons, but you have to, and especially in these days of these potential lawsuits, because it takes control of your budget away from you.
"We've seen it in the prisons before; we've seen it at the state hospitals in the mental health situation; we've seen it in Felix (special-education programs)," she said, referring to past and current federal consent decrees.
With a full year of experience by the new department directors, "it's put us in a better position, I think, to make some stronger proposals than last year," Lingle said.
The governor's requests are expected to include $18 million more for the state mental hospital and related programs, reauthorization of $18.5 million to build a new Maui Community Correctional Center, $2 million in planning money for new detention facilities on Oahu and Kauai, and $7 million more to keep 225 more inmates at mainland prisons or at the federal detention facility near Honolulu Airport.
As of Dec. 8, Hawaii had 1,438 inmates housed in prisons on the mainland to ease overcrowding in isle prisons, an export strategy Lingle has said she ultimately wants to abandon.
Lingle acknowledged that about $40 million of the supplemental funding would go to the state's 12 community hospitals for which lawmakers only approved funding for the current year. Legislative leaders withheld second-year funding after expressing concern about operations of the private company that manages the hospitals.
According to Capitol sources, who spoke on the condition they not be identified, Lingle has held with her earlier position to grant the Department of Education only $2 million instead of the $51.2 million supplemental appropriation it sought.
The University of Hawaii would get $5 million of the $20 million supplemental increase requested, including $700,000 for a new film school, the sources said.
Another key increase would be $5 million to the Department of Land & Natural Resources to combat invasive alien species of plants and animals that threaten Hawaii's native ecology, the sources said.