Vander Plaats rips Culver revenue analysis

Gov. Chet Culver "is trying to fool Iowans into believing the budget glass is half full when it's actually completely empty,” Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob Vander Plaats said Tuesday.

“It's bad enough that his overspending has driven the state budget to a $900-million shortfall this new fiscal year,” Vander Plaats said. “Now he's proving his only strategy to get us out of his mess is to deny it's even happening and still insist things are getting better.”

A spokesman for the governor fired back, saying Vander Plaats sounds like “just one more gloom-and-doom Republican who seems to like the recession his party created so much he doesn't want it to end.”

“The fact is, however, gross revenues for the state have improved, and by any measure that is a step in the right direction,” said Phil Roeder, Culver's deputy chief of staff. “And when that fact is combined with other recent evidence -- such as today's Iowa economic indicator report and yesterday's Creighton University Midwest economic report -- there are early signs of improvements in the economy.”

Vander Plaats, one of six Republicans seeking their party's nomination to square off against Culver next year, was critical of the first-term Democrat's assertion Monday that the LSA report showed state tax collections were up 1.2 percent in July. Read another way, the LSA said revenues fell 6 percent last month.

Culver's boast that revenues were increasing was “politically motivated,” Vander Plaats said, explaining the LSA attributed the increase to a one-month bookkeeping change that inflates sales and use tax payments by about $40 million.

“In their minds, everyone else is wrong and they're the only ones who are right,” Vander Plaats charged.

Rather than making political attacks, Vander Plaats should read Culver's comments, Roeder said.

“As Gov. Culver said loud and clear, these latest figures do not mean we can let down in our efforts to maintain Iowa's balanced budget or work our way out of this recession with programs such as I-JOBS and the federal recovery,” Roeder said.

Culver should take immediate action to trim state spending over the next 11 months of the 2010 fiscal year “instead of waiting and hoping, hoping and waiting until next spring that things will change,” Vander Plaats said. “Hoping is not a leadership strategy,”

 Culver, Roeder said, has made it clear that he is prepared to make additional budget cuts if they become necessary.