January 28, 2009 02:39 AM UTC

The Pain Revealed

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Rocky Mountain News reports:

Colorado must close prisons, slice roughly $225 million from schools and higher education and suspend property-tax breaks for senior citizens to close its funding shortfall, Gov. Bill Ritter’s budget director said Tuesday.

The proposals are part of approximately $823 million in personnel and service cuts Ritter proposed for the budget year beginning on July 1. The governor also hopes to take some $264 million out of earmarked funds to keep government services running, Office of State Planning and Budgeting Director Todd Saliman told the Joint Budget Committee.

Sales and income tax revenues, which are dropping sharply this recession, were forecast last month to be roughly $1 billion short of the expenditures Ritter proposed for fiscal year 2009-10. Saliman earlier this month announced about $201 million in cuts to be made over the next six months but warned then that reductions for the next year are going to be much worse…

A wild card in all of this is the question of how much federal stimulus money the state will receive and how many strings it will have attached, Saliman noted.