News

Representative Hawk discusses state’s 2008-09 budget

Says funding for K-12 education will remain consistent

May 27, 2008

On Friday afternoon, State Representative David Hawk stopped by The Beacon for a chat. While many issues facing Unicoi County were discussed, the topic that dominated the majority of the visit was the 2008-09 State Budget.

Despite this year’s half-billion dollar shortfall, compared to last year’s half-billion dollar increase, Representative Hawk remains optimistic that the budget cuts will not have a major impact on Unicoi County.

“We’re still maintaining all the services at pretty much the same level where they have been,” the representative said. “Where you will see the majority of the departmental cuts is going to be administratively out of Nashville.”

“The local services, hopefully, will remain at the level of service we’re used to in Northeast Tennessee.”

The proposed budget which was originally presented to the legislature was set at approximately $28 billion dollars. The actual budget that was passed was closer to $27 billion.

Hawk said that the current state of the economy is partly to blame for this year’s large shortfall.
“The economy has been tough,” he commented. “We have chosen to be a state government that is driven by sales taxes and the sales tax revenue for the first time in two generations has actually had a decrease from years prior. We’ve never seen that.”

In fact, April 2008 was the worst month in terms of sales tax revenue that Tennessee has had in almost fifty years.

“But in relation to all the states around us, we are actually better prepared to work through the economic downturn we’re having now because we do have such a large rainy day fund. We are very frugal with the way we operate state government.”

Many citizens have expressed concerns that this year’s budget cuts would seriously hurt the state’s, and in turn the county’s, educational systems. However, Hawk said that the legislature made no cuts to education.

“We held harmless the whole K-12 educational system, so there were no cuts to education,” Hawk commented. “There’s just not going to be any increase, or any huge increase in funding, like what we had hoped to do.”

“Anytime funding stays the same it looks like there may be a cut…but education is the one area where funding remained consistent.”

Hawk also said that in spite of the budget shortfall he does not foresee any effect on transportation. “I think our road dollars are going to continue,” he said.