SC Budget & Control Board Approves 4% Cut From Agencies Thursday

  State agencies will now have to cut 4 percent of their budgets as South Carolina’s financial oversight board deals with lagging tax collections.

The Budget and Control Board met Thursday and approved the across-the-board cuts to keep the budget balanced.

The expected $200 million reduction would include a cut of $85 million from schools.

State Department of Education spokesman Pete Pillow says the $85.4 million cut is on top of the $131 million that was already cut from schools this year when the budget was written. “School districts will receive adjustments to their line item accounts next week or the week after from the SDE’s Office of Finance.  Some line items are “hold harmless” and cannot be reduced, which means the cuts will have to occur in fewer accounts and may amount to more than 4 per cent in some cases,“ he says in a written statement from the agency.

Rep. Dan Cooper, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a member of the Budget and Control Board, says school districts were expecting more cuts and most planned for them. “That would be the ultimate problem with the cuts, is bigger classes for the kids. So I don’t see that happening, from what I’ve been told,“ he says. 

Those reductions also mean more problems for colleges, health care and prisons. In a little more than a year, more than $1.3 billion has been slashed from spending as the recession pounded tax collections.

In the past, Gov. Mark Sanford has argued the Legislature should deal with budget shortfalls by coming into session and making targeted spending reductions. But this time, he said waiting until lawmakers come back into session in January would give agencies much less time to absorb the cuts, making the cuts even more painful.

He told News Channel 7 after the meeting that public safety should not be compromised by the cuts. “We’re going to try to minimize that so that you maximize, again, troopers on the road, what’s happening with regard to DUI enforcement here in the Labor Day holiday.“ 

The Department of Public Safety says it’ll use federal money to prevent a loss of service. “The state Budget and Control Board’s action today amounts to an additional $2.4 million cut in our state budget,” SCDPS Director Mark Keel said Wednesday. “We will use a portion of the $15 million in federal stimulus funds received by the department to maintain our current level of operations.”