#AKbudget| The morning of the final day ...

Given developments yesterday, as of noon today I have the current status of projected state spending for FY 2015 at somewhere around $6.16 billion (resulting in a projected one-year deficit of $1.66 billion) with more changes likely as the House works through the final version of their capital budget and the Senate's proposed final version of the education package, and the Senate (and subsequently, the House) deal with the final version of the refinery bailout package.

Surprisingly, there is no other public source of information which attempts to do the same calculations on a real time basis.

The components of the calculations are as follows:

The sources are:  Revenue (Spring Revenue Sources Book), Op Budget (yesterday's Conference Committee close out), Cap Budget (HFIN CS, adjusted to add an additional $110 million in increased education funding per SFIN version), PERS/TRS (this one is difficult because of the one-time injection, but estimate of "annual" portion of the injection based on extrapolating from projected FY 2016 levels).

At this level, in its two years this Governor and Legislature will have spent (including the PERS/TRS injection) roughly $6.2 billion (or more than one-third) of the state's roughly $17 billion in cash reserves that existed at the start of the Legislature, leaving Alaska with only a little over $10 billion in reserves as it deals with projections of a remaining decade of budget deficits, at p. 7).

We will continue to refine these numbers as the session comes to a close.