11.24.01
Cowan expects state budget shrinkage to affect counties
Newport News Times
The budget shortfall caused by the national and state recession will impact Lincoln and other counties, County Commissioner Jean Cowan said this week.
Cowan said Wednesday that she had just returned from “intense” sessions of the Association of Oregon Counties. She said county officials are preparing for an expected special session to be called by Governor John Kitzhaber to deal with the growing shortfall.
That shortfall had been estimated at $300 million several weeks ago, but now the figure has become “uncertain” as the economy continues to show signs of further contraction along with some evidence of new growth.
Two weeks ago, in an interview with the News-Times, Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Roberts pegged the shortfall at $600 million.
Officials from around Oregon at the association meeting sought to coordinate efforts at maintaining important services by viewing them all, “local, state and federal, as a system, instead of going begging with one, two, three top priorities for funds,” Cowan said.
She noted that Kitzhaber has asked all state agencies to look at reductions of 2 to 10 percent, which “all rolls down to the local governments.”
At the same time, Cowan said, “there has been a lot of talk since Sept. 11 about the role of public health services in all kinds of emergency situations, not just this one. Here on the coast, our challenges are usually natural disasters, things like floods, and we are aware of the health implications of such events.”
Cowan has been an advocate of better funding for county-level and other public health services. Since Sept. 11, she has been joined in that view by a number of studies and national leaders who have urged better federal attention to a national public health system that has been allowed to slide for several decades.
But the current economic realities and the state budget shortfall aren’t changed by those improvements. “We’ll try to maintain service levels to our folks any way we can,” she concluded.
