Good state budget news doesn’t erase growing problems

IT WAS A LONG TIME coming, but earlier this month South Carolina got some good economic news: For the first time since 2000, the state collected more taxes than budgeted. In fact, the state collected almost twice as much in surplus tax revenues as officials had projected just three months earlier.

That bodes well for individuals throughout the state, because it indicates that the economy has finally turned the corner — something that can only happen when more people are making more money. It’s too early to tell whether this trend will continue amid mixed signals at the national level, but it’s certainly better than continuing to move in the opposite direction.

The $243 million surplus also bodes well for our state as a whole, because it allowed officials to pay off an unconstitutional deficit from 2002 and begin to replenish dried-up reserve funds. That guarantees that government agencies can continue borrowing money at low interest rates and means the state will have some room to maneuver in the event of a major hurricane or other disaster that demands an immediate infusion of funds.

Moreover, the surplus suggests that we might finally have halted the three-year string of mid-year budget cuts and year-end deficits that severely undermined our ability to do such basic things as put an adequate number of adequately trained teachers in the classrooms, keep order in our prisons and on our highways and keep the dangerously mentally ill from prowling our streets and clogging our emergency rooms.

State officials have a wide range of options for responding to this apparent change of course for state finances, and the choice they make will play a huge role in determining whether our state becomes a better or a worse place to live.

Gov. Mark Sanford greeted the news of the surplus with a pledge to go forward with his second round of intense budget hearings with state agencies, and House Ways and Means Chairman Bobby Harrell warned that state agencies shouldn’t expect to see their budgets restored to pre-recession levels.

Both responses were completely appropriate. Even if we had unlimited funds, the unprecedented degree of scrutiny Mr. Sanford has brought to state spending is healthy and necessary. And one of the worst things state leaders could do as money starts to increase is to assume that the way it was allocated before the recession was the best way to allocate it; we know very well that this is not the case.

However, it’s important to remember that throughout the state’s fiscal crisis, the governor and Legislature were largely unable to agree on ways the state can provide the same services for less money or on specific programs and initiatives we could do without. So three years of cuts resulted in some critical areas of state government being woefully underfunded: Many schools can no longer afford to hire as many teachers as they need; the state is not funding the programs that lawmakers decided were essential to improving struggling schools; our highway death rate is up, in part because we have fewer troopers; we don’t have enough guards in our prisons. And the list goes on.

In other words, we’re not starting the next budget year at zero; we’re starting well below zero, and the job of our governor and our Legislature is to get us moving forward. Anyone who ignores that fact or pretends otherwise ill serves our state.