Photo above: Gov. Larry Hogan high fives children at Earth Day tree planting. (Photo by Tom Nappi, Governor’s Office)
By Barry Rascovar
For MarylandReporter.com
Can Republican Gov. Larry Hogan Jr. tame Maryland’s long-standing structural budget deficit? Judging from his first stab at it, he’s more than halfway there.
But high hurdles lie ahead if he is to reach the point where the state’s ongoing revenues far exceed annual spending.
Hogan may grumble to appease conservative groups about the remaining $206 million structural imbalance in the budget that’s been approved for the fiscal year starting July 1.
Yet that is a sharp reduction from the deficit anticipated back in November of a $525 million shortfall under Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley.
Not too shabby
The General Assembly’s Department of Legislative Services (DLS) says Hogan is 68% of the way toward wiping out the structural imbalance — and if he continues to hold firm in denying state workers a 2% pay raise starting July 1, he will reach 82% of his goal.
Not too shabby for a Republican governor facing an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature.
Those deficit numbers will grow somewhat if Hogan decides to give Democratic lawmakers some of the $202 million they asked him to restore to various education, health and wage programs.
Still, Hogan begins preparations for his second budget in remarkably good shape.
It’s no secret that the Big Three growth items in Maryland’s budget are: 1) soaring debt service payments; 2) continually rising education aid, and 3) ever-rising health-care costs.
Too many bonds
Debt service alone will jump by $167 million next year. It has tripled in the last three years. Hogan needs to take a hard look at reducing or slowing Maryland’s issuance of general-obligation bonds, including the always popular school construction allocations, which in July’s budget will hit a record $380 million.
Complicating matters for the governor is Maryland’s too-slow economic recovery from the Great Recession.
DLS estimates state revenues will grow in fiscal year 2017 by a modest 4%. Yet it will take a 5.7% growth rate in tax collections to balance spending with revenue.
Economic development is the key, though that’s a long-term proposition. Hogan’s “Maryland is open for business” theme won’t result in major tax gains for the state any time soon. So the governor will have to continue tightening state agency spending and find areas where deeper cuts can be made without creating a harsh legislative backlash.
Ratcheting down the structural imbalance over the next three years is Hogan’s best option. The problem is that he’s also determined to deliver on his main campaign promise — lower taxes.
Simply balancing the state’s books won’t be enough. He’s got to go further so he can justify a tax cut that does not create a new structural deficit.
More daunting problems
That’s where Hogan’s problems multiply. Aid to local governments seems a likely target, until you start to pull the plug on specific spending programs, like money for schools, police, fire-fighting, the poor, libraries and parks.
Indeed, almost every area of state government spending affects huge numbers of Maryland citizens. Hogan must take care not to antagonize too many of them. If he does, he could be harming his re-election chances.
Looking down the road, Hogan faces even more daunting budget difficulties, Indeed, DLS puts the state’s combined deficit at $1.165 billion for fiscal years 2019 and 2020.
As bad as this sounds, it is a huge improvement over what O’Malley left behind: a combined estimated deficit for those two years of nearly $2 billion. Hogan reduced that future imbalance by 41% in his first budget.
Fundamental spending changes won’t be possible with Maryland’s Democratic legislature acting as a brake on Hogan’s budget-cutting tendencies. That’s why the slow-but-steady approach makes so much sense.
It won’t please Hogan’s absolutist supporters, but gradualism could prove the most practical and politically astute path for Maryland’s Republican governor.
Barry Rascovar’s writings can be found at www.politicalmaryland.com. He can be reached at brascovar@hotmail.com
Structural deficit means increasing the budget way faster the growth of inflation, wages, population, and property values. It means padding the budget with all sorts of garbage that shouldn’t be there. This stuff needs to be taken out.
We keep hearing about the “structural” budget deficit as the difference between annual revenues and annual spending. Shouldn’t the definition include the payments we slough off into the future such as the pension fund, “defined benefit” plans that grow exponentially, generous collective bargaining agreements that mortgage our future, Purple/Red Line decisions that do not account for projections that are always less rosy than predicted? The budget should show a table that projects the cost of all decisions 10 years from now and should show revenue projections in the same way.
It seems that on every election, presidential, gubernatorial, county, etc., there are are at least 10 spending authorization questions for various county projects….
I vote against every one of them each election since I don’t want my taxes raised.
Three things, rising debt service, increasing education aid, and rising health care costs, we’re mentioned…
Perhaps, Maryland should stop issuing bonds until economic growth in this state
is growing enough to support the debt service, The Federal Government “gravy train” has left the station and those in charge of economic development should be encouraging Maryland based companies to expand and to draw new businesses to the state…
2.) Increasing aid to education… How much of the aid is wasted, poorly spent, etc. ?
Has a forensic audit ever been done on where the money goes or how it’s spent ?
And why is the cost of education exceeding the rate of inflation, year to year ?
3.) The rising cost of health care… Obama care hasn’t solved it, in fact, it made it worse !
I don’t think that Maryland can do better…