KEJA -- Raising The Bar: Debra Miller Statement

Kentucky Can Do Better!

Raising the Bar: Kentucky's Real Budget Report

Teleconference Statement by Debra Miller, Director of Public Policy, Kentucky Youth Advocates:
December 15, 2005

Kentuckians are weary of the recitation of our poor standing in relation to other parts of our country. No matter the depressing nature of those statistics, they provide the context in which KEJA releases our Raising the Bar report today. Just this summer we all read about these disturbing facts:

• Kentucky fell five spots to 42nd in overall child well-being, the state’s worst ranking in the 16 years the Annie E. Casey Foundation has released the national KIDS COUNT study.
• According to Governing Magazine, Kentucky is dead last in per capita state spending on education. The Prichard Committee and others have pointed to this statistic as evidence of failing to maintain the commitment of our historic 1990 education reform.
• Kentucky poverty rate increased faster than all but one other state between 2003 and 2004, rising from 14.3 to 16 percent, according to the US Census Bureau. Child poverty is even higher and rose from 22 to 24 percent from 2000 to 2003.
• Kentuckians die at a rate that is 18 percent above the national average. A recent newspaper series has highlighted the poor health of our state.

KEJA, our individual organizations, and our individual members, as well as Kentucky citizens we talk to throughout the state are simply not satisfied with the sad shape of the quality of life in our state. We undertook this study to describe what it will take to Raise the Bar and the quality of life in our state.

In 2001, the Fox Report, a well-regarded study commissioned by the legislature, declared that Kentucky faced a gap between the money coming in from tax revenues and the money needed over the next decade to pay for existing services. In policy circles, this gap is called a structural deficit. The report projected that by 2010 Kentucky would be $2.3 billion short of the money needed to just stand still. The report did not take into consideration any need to expand services. And since the report, Kentucky has endured six rounds of budget cuts in the past five years (under Governors Patton and Fletcher) totaling about $1 billion dollars.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C. has studied the budgets of the states and in May, 2005, released a study called “Faulty Foundations: State Structural Budget Problems and How to Fix Them.” They identified 10 key factors that predicted the risk that a state would have a structural deficit. Kentucky scored 8. Because of a number of policy decisions in the past and the lack of political will to revisit some of these decisions, Kentucky is left with the chronic inability of state revenues to grow in tandem with economic growth and the cost of government. (See the Center’s website, www.cbpp.org, for the full text of the report.) It is important to note that the so-called tax modernization passed by the 2005 General Assembly did not significantly decrease the number of factors contributing to our state’s structural gap.

Turning back to KEJA’s Raising the Bar report, we brought together the accumulated evidence about the chronic under funding across many of Kentucky’s public services. We looked at five key areas of the state budget: K-12 education, higher education, health care, housing, and the justice service. Taken together, these areas represent about 80 percent of the General Fund spending. In each area, we turned to the experts in the field. We cite evidence of funding shortfalls and estimates of what it would take to move Kentucky up from the basement in national rankings.
The report is not comprehensive – that is it doesn’t cover all the areas of the state budget. For instance, we didn’t include the critical need to upgrade the services available to abused and neglected children or the myriad of services to protect our environment and assure Kentuckians breathe clean air and drink clean water.

However, just within the five areas of state government we examined, Kentucky has unmet needs totaling $1-1.8 billion. This is a sobering indication of what it will take to raise the bar in the lives of Kentuckians. Here are some of the needed investments we document:

• Invest $337 million in K-12 education to bring our per-pupil spending up to the average of the surrounding states.
• Invest $250 million in our higher education system to catch up with comparable schools in other states.
• Provide $265 million to maintain health care programs like Medicaid and health insurance for state employees.
• Provide $25 million to bring our mental health services to the national average.
• Invest $136 million in our criminal justice system, including funding for county jails, public defenders, legal aid and substance abuse treatment.

Too often when experts in a particular service arena talk about the need for expansion and increased funding, it is dismissed as a greedy grab by special interest group. What we believe is unique about our report is its breadth and our voice as regular citizens of the state who believe we can – and must – do better.

###

Raising The Bar Press Room