LANSING – With the United States in one of its worst post-war recessions, it will take the country’s recovery through the financial bailout, lower oil prices, government stimulus, plain old time, and for the auto sector to be stabilized, for Michigan to rebound, House Fiscal Agency Director Mitch Bean told the chamber on Thursday.

Bean gave a budget presentation to the full chamber, outlining where the state gets its revenues from and what it spends those monies on. He also went over several economic factors affecting the country and state’s economies, as well as a historical perspective on several areas including vehicle sales, housing starts and transportation funding.

The presentation comes a week before Governor Jennifer Granholm is to present her 2009-10 budget to the Legislature.

Unless the state receives some money through a federal stimulus, lawmakers will have to find ways to shore up $200 million in revenue shortfalls in the current fiscal year and $1.4 billion in funding gaps for the new fiscal year that starts October 1.

As Congress is still debating a federal stimulus package, specifics were not included in Bean’s presentation, nor will they likely be part of the governor’s budget.

The stimulus package will be particularly helpful to the Department of Transportation, where officials reviewed with the House Transportation Committee earlier in the day the funding crunch that grows worse every year with the state’s flat per-gallon tax.

Ron DeCook, director of governmental affairs for the department, said the $800 million that would come to the agency under the current version of the federal stimulus roughly equates to a full year of state funding. He said the bill requires half of the money to be obligated to projects in 90 days and the rest in August 2010, the projects must be ready to start, and they must be projects that are not already underway.

He said the money would be allocated in the same way as under the current formula for distributing state tax revenues.

While Bean stayed away from suggesting areas lawmakers could cut, he did inform them that because of the nature of strings being attached to federal dollars, restricted funds that also can only be used for a specific purpose and the large amount of money that gets forwarded to local units of government, that any big savings would have to come in the areas of education and human services.

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