It certified that state revenue will cover all of the Legislature’s spending bills.
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Comptroller Glenn Hegar, conceding that he had been too bullish about oil prices and the economy, said Tuesday that Texas will take in almost $5 billion less in this budget cycle than he forecast in January.
“Despite the significant retrenchment in the oil and gas sector we witnessed in fiscal 2015, revenues remained in line with the estimates we made in January”, said Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar.
The comptroller is now predicting the taxable value of a barrel of oil will average $44.53 in the first year of the biennium and $50.87 in the second year.
In August, Sherman sales tax receipts dropped 0.28 percent, to $1.42 million, bringing the year’s total to $15.15 million.
Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, took the downward revision in stride. While the CRE still predicts moderate growth for the state, current economic conditions dictate slightly lower revenue projections than those we released in January, ‘ Hegar said.
Liberal budget analyst Eva DeLuna Castro of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, though, pointed to Hegar’s revised estimate of a almost 1 percent decline in all funds revenue from the last budget cycle.
But he said Texas nonetheless will wrap up the current two-year fiscal cycle in August 2017 with about $4.2 billion more in general-purpose revenue than it needs to float the budget that lawmakers passed in this year’s session.
Next month, voters will decide on Proposition 7, a constitutional amendment that would use part of the state’s general sales and use tax and motor vehicle sales tax for the State Highway Fund. But it wouldn’t have an effect on Tuesday’s projections.
“The big worry is how schools and health care will fare” in the next legislative session, she said.
The comptroller’s office said that there is still plenty of padding in the budget because of the money that lawmakers didn’t end up spending. That will still be the highest balance the fund has ever held since its creation in 1988, but it’s lower than the $11.1 billion Hegar predicted in January. Under Hegar’s more sober forecast, lawmakers left $14.6 billion on the sidelines – $10.4 billion of it in rainy day dollars.
Revenue estimate accuracy – or lack thereof – bedeviled his Republican predecessor, former Comptroller Susan Combs. Duh-duh-da-da”, Hegar said. “Immediately, I go, ‘Well, thank you very much.
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“Even with growth of shale, (the Texas economy) is more diversified now than in the mid-’80s”, Phillips said. “The numbers are the numbers, and that was the data that we had at the time, and this is the data we had as of Thursday”.
