Reporting from Indianapolis and Denver — Across the country, state legislators and governors struggled Tuesday night to agree on spending cuts and tax hikes as they ran up against a midnight deadline to approve a budget.
The day began with 14 states lacking a final budget signed by the governor. By evening, several had come to some agreement.
But some states -- most significantly, Arizona and Pennsylvania -- faced the specter of a government shutdown for failing to have a budget in place by the start of the new fiscal year today. Two others -- Ohio and North Carolina -- basically conceded that they needed more time by passing legislation to allow government business to continue into July while they keep debating.
California lawmakers were working into the night trying to revise the hopelessly out-of-balance state budget.
Last-minute brinkmanship is par for the course in state budget fights, and midnight votes are not unheard of in normal years. But the number of states flirting with shutdowns or special sessions this year is extraordinary, said Brian Sigritz of the National Assn. of State Budget Officers.
"For states, this downturn is one of the worst, if not the worst," he said, adding that it was the first year in his organization's history that state spending had dropped for two years in a row. "Late budgets are more common in bad times than in good."
For some states, the deadline forced legislators to compromise. Democrats in Indiana's General Assembly grudgingly passed a two-year, $28-billion budget after Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels began sending notices to state workers explaining what to do in the event of a shutdown.
The Republican-dominated Senate followed suit Tuesday evening, even though the budget had less education spending than many wanted. "It's tough medicine," said state House Minority Leader Brian Bosma, a Republican from Indianapolis. "But it's the responsible thing to do."
In other states, conflict showed no signs of abating.
In Arizona, Republicans thought they had resolved an intraparty dispute between anti-tax conservatives and GOP Gov. Jan Brewer -- who had called for a temporary tax hike to preserve vital services -- by agreeing to place the tax increase on the November ballot. But a key state Senate committee rejected the deal. State parks ordered campers to leave in expectation that a government shutdown would close them today.
