Governor Bryant Calls Special Session to Address 2016 Budget Deficit

State legislators will be making a trip to the Capital tomorrow. Governor Phil Bryant has called a special session to address shortfalls in Mississippi’s 2016 budget.
The session will open at 10 a.m. with one item on the agenda: legislation authorizing the governor to transfer money from the state’s rainy day fund into the general fund in order to cover the deficit. The state could be looking at a shortfall of as much as $75 million in the total $6 billion plus budget. State Representative Scott Delano said, “A lot of people are going to take the opportunity to poke their finger in the eye of the leadership to try to say that we have done a bad job with our budget. The reality of it is that we’ve done a really good job with our budget for the past five years. We have worked to turn around our fiscal budget from a shortfall of about $600 million to now we have in the rainy day fund close to about $400 million. We need that money now and this is exactly why we fought so hard to work on our budgets.”
To date, Bryant has already ordered two rounds of budget cuts and dipped into the rainy day fund to try to make up for lagging tax collections.