state budgets

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.

There are a couple of faintly hopeful signposts on the western economy today. The biggie - the California budget doesn't look so bad.  Despite regular tidings of gloom and doom, comes now a glimmer of good cheer. Buoyed perhaps by a resurgent stock market and other signs the recession is on its way out, reports the San Jose Mercury News, the state's revenue and spending projections "ought to hold up to at least mid-January, and maybe even beyond," according to analysts and economists. Woo-hoo.

 However, "the glad tidings may be temporary," writes Merc reporter Denis C. Theriault, who notes the deficit for next year is already estimated at $7.4 billion.

Still, it's the first time this year when when deficit slashing wasn't the chief occupation in the state capital. And it's good news for state parks in California. Remember those 100 parks that were going to be shut down because the state simply didn't have the money to operate them? Well, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger now says he won't have to shut them down, but he is going to stop buying equipment to maintain them and lay off many of the employees who staff them. His decision also came after activists launched campaigns to keep the parks open, and a Sacramento environmental group posted a memo from state park attorneys warning that taxpayers could be on the hook for breaching park concession contracts if parks were closed.

There is more upside to the bad news of state budgets. In Colorado, where the state is facing a $318 million shortfall, some social justice advocates see the the draconian cuts the state is forced to make as a way to face up to some real problems in the state prison system. That has already happened in California.