Video: Addressing The Shortfall In The State Budget

GOLDEN TRIANGLE, Miss. (WCBI)-Governor Phil Bryant is calling lawmakers back to Jackson for a special session.

Revenues are down and there’s not enough money to have balanced budget.

House District 37 Representative Gary Chism said he was notified through a text message on Monday morning that Governor Phil Bryant had officially called for a special session.

“All we’re going to do is allow the governor to go into our savings account, our rainy day fund, and get that 40 or 50 million dollars to satisfy the constitutional requirement of a balanced budget,” said Chism.

The state currently has 364 million dollars set aside in the rainy day fund, so Chism said there will be no problem making up the difference.

However, State Representative Tyrone Ellis feels it’s unorthodox the way the special session is being called.

“I say that because we could have taken care of this long before now,” said Ellis, Mississippi House of Representatives District 38.  “We could have done it while we were in regular session. Now it’s going to cost the tax payers more money to get the budget balanced.”

Ellis believes better money management could have prevented both the special session and the fiscal year 2016 budget shortfall.

“We got caught up in a fix by giving away 300 to 400 million dollars in corporate money taxes and having to cut all of this money from the state budget, and then cutting money out of the revenue stream, we just got caught up in a fix, and now we got to go and fix this fix,” said Ellis.

However, Chism said a boost in revenue sales could’ve also potentially prevented the state from being in this predicament.

“Every year when we’re down there we used estimated revenue,” he said.  “We guess what they’re going to be, this year we just happened to come up one percent short.”

In a press release, Lt. Governor Tate Reeves said the state came up short in this years budget by less than one percent.

Ellis said it’s going to take better management and decision making to keep this situation from happening again.

“Once we get to the point where we can face the reality of prioritizing the budget, and prioritizing the management’s decision that we have to make, then we’ll get the job done,” he said.

Bryant is the only person who can call a special session and he sets the agenda, which is only for the budget shortfall.

However, Ellis wishes the governor would add other items, such as the school and mental health budgets.

The special session begins at ten Tuesday morning.