Governor O'Malley has submitted to the General Assembly the next to last budget of his Administration. You can read all the details of it here.
But, these are not all the details. The transportation budget still isn't finalized, and within that budget one may find what may or may not happen with the gas tax this year. Why is that budget not yet done, and why is the transportation budget different? To be perfectly honest, I don't quite know. Perhaps someone will explain? But it would seem to make sense to me if all the budget were submitted at the same time.
Interesting to me is that the business of state government seems to be humming back to normal. The state is giving employees a 3% cost of living increase this year, and there are no furlough days. So State employees can stop their griping-- rightly or wrongly so-- on how they've suffered all these pay cuts and furlough days over the years, and get back to giving their full effort.
Also interesting is the 3% tuition increase at state colleges and universities being proposed in this budget. I have just read (no Jessie, I'm not providing the links) to where states such as Nebraska and Iowa are increasing the amounts of state-appropriated funds to their university systems' operating budgets, so those states' systems can freeze tuition. What an amazing concept!
On the claim that the state budget creates 43,000 jobs-- that sort of data has been twisted, interpreted and mangled so many times over that all sides are right. Semantic and perception arguments are of no interest to me here.
State aid to local governments for police protection, environmental aid, and incentives for high-tech companies to grow in-state are all big hallmarks of this budget. In sum, it's a budget that rewards the priorities of the administration. Don't really see anything overly impressive or innovative here.
