Oregon budget

State budgets are war zones. And the evidence is all over the place. In Oregon, the recently retired president of the University of Oregon is calling for the conversion of the state’s largest universities into public corporations. That in order to save them, Dave Frohnmayer explains.

In Washington, Gov. Christine Gregoire, facing down a budget gap estimated today at more than $2 billion, says this is going to be hard to fix. To make her point, she illustrates it like this:

Ending all state aid to the University of Washington and Washington State University would free up $493 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1, 2010. Shuttering the state's 34 community and technical colleges, that would produce another $643 million in savings.

Now, she’s not really saying she’s going to do that. She also says shutting down Washington's penal system would save about $800 million a year, in a story reported by Jerry Cornfield in the Everett Herald. And she’s not likely to do that wholesale either.