Carcieri ready to submit budget

PROVIDENCE – Gov. Donald L. Carcieri will give a televised address from his office at 7 p.m. tonight to reveal his plan to close a projected $357 million budget shortfall in the current fiscal year.
The address will be aired live on three TV network affiliates – WJAR NBC 10, WLNE ABC 6 and WPRI 12, the CBS affiliate – and will kick off a budget process that is certain to be difficult. The governor will submit his supplemental budget proposal, which will surely feature sizable spending cuts, to the General Assembly, which will make its own revisions before approval weeks from now.
House finance officials have put the projected deficit at more than $360 million for fiscal 2009.
“My supplement budget plan will include many hard choices necessary to bring the budget back into balance and to put the state back on the right path,” Carcieri said in a statement Monday announcing his televised address. “The supplemental budget will also address the underlying policies that have led to our current financial challenges. This is the time for all Rhode Island’s elected officials, here at the State House and on the local level, to work together to put Rhode Island on a path that strengthens our economy and our communities.”
Previously, the Carcieri administration had indicated that it was eying state aid to cities and towns as one area to make large budget cuts. (READ MORE) That’s why local leaders are anxiously awaiting the governor’s proposal.
“I’m obviously going to listen carefully to what the governor says tonight,” Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline told Providence Business News this morning. It “will be very difficult, but we will have to figure it out,” he said.
The city already has begun drafting an emergency budget proposal to respond to the expected cut in local aid, Cicilline said, and the mayor has directed city departments to develop a list of potential cost cuts. He also said he plans to reach out to union leaders to discuss the situation.
“This is a moment when we are all going to have to work together very closely – our federal delegation, our state leaders, and cities and towns – to get through what will be an extraordinarily, maybe historically, difficult [year],” Cicilline said.
“It will be one of the most difficult budgets, certainly, in my lifetime, and we all have to work together to get through this in a way that minimizes the harm to residents of our city and, certainly, residents of our cities and towns,” he said.