Missouri’s next state budget is not expected to have as much money due to pandemic funding drying up. That’s the word from Dan Haug, Missouri’s Budget Director. He also said that revenues have declined 3.3%, compared to last year at this time, due mostly to tax cuts.
“I think revenues are down, but I don’t think that’s necessarily indicates that the Missouri economy is in a really bad place,” he told lawmakers. “It’s just obviously, we’ve got tax policy and when you do these tax cuts, then it takes a while for that to sort of normalize itself.”
Missouri budget leaders will get to work soon on the Fiscal Year 2026 state operating budget.
“You know, it’s going to be a little different than the last couple of sessions where we got, just to be honest, we’ve had some big pots of money here recently that we’ve been able to do things with,” Haug said. “I think we’re going to be back to a more normal budget sort of a pre-COVID, type of atmosphere here, as far as what we’re looking at.”
Missouri Senate Appropriations Chair Lincoln Hough, R-Springfield, said that it’s not all doom and gloom.
“We tried very hard to appropriate these one-time dollars with one-time expenditures, right? You’ve heard that a million times over,” Hough said. “The thing I would like to remind everyone is that we also have invested considerably, I think is the fair way to put it, in our state workforce in the last half dozen years.”
Hough previously told Missourinet that he expects the legislature to address budget shortfalls in the upcoming legislative session.
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