Branstad draws budget priorities

By The Gazette Editorial Board

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The Iowa Department of Human Resources, following orders to become more efficient as part of last year's legislative efforts to reduce state spending, closed and consolidated several offices and reduced hours in many counties. More than 600 DHS workers took early retirement.

Now, because of an additional $27 million in cuts announced last week, the outgoing DHS director projected that nearly 200 positions could be permanently lost and 150 mental health services beds eliminated by June 30.

That's too severe. Those reductions would affect many front-line workers and could weaken such essential, overburdened services as mental health and child protection.

So we were glad to see new Gov. Terry Branstad recognize the risk to DHS priorities, as well as in $23 million more cuts to corrections. He wants to backfill some of their budgets, probably from the expected surplus in this fiscal year's ending balance.

At the same time, his administration will look for savings elsewhere in the state budget by firing some of the 1,000 state employees recently hired to fill vacancies created by an early retirement program. Positions will be reviewed to determine which are “absolutely necessary.”

Tough choices. However, Branstad, in this case, is using the “scalpel” approach instead of the “ax,” as he discussed during his campaign.