With Nevada facing a projected $3.5 billion deficit, the 2011 Legislature may have no choice but to cut the state’s popular Millennium Scholarship program, Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, said Thursday on a statewide political program.
Leslie, who is running for a state Senate seat after the Assembly because of term limits, said the $3.5 billion deficit represents half of the state’s general fund and that more cuts to government services during the 2011 Legislature are “inevitable.”
With dwindling resources, Nevada must first fund programs and services that are mandated by the state constitution, Leslie said on the Nevada Newsmakers television program.
“What we are going to have to do is go back and look at the services that we are mandated constitutionally to provide,” Leslie said. “And then there are services that we all love -- one example would be the Millennium Scholarship, everyone loves that program - but we are not constitutionally mandated to provide it. So a program like that, even though it is extremely popular, may definitely be on the chopping block.”
The Millennium Scholarship program, set up by former Gov. Kenny Guinn, has been funded from the state portion of the Tobacco Settlement and in some years, with an infusion from the state’s unclaimed property fund. Last month, however, the Interim Finance Committee of the Legislature transferred $4.2 million into the scholarship program to keep it solvent through the 2011 fiscal year.
“If you are looking at slashing 50 percent of the state budget, there are things we have to provide,” Leslie said on Newsmakers. “We have to provide prisons. We have to provide at least a minimum funding for k-12 education and we are going to have to separate things we can fund and we have to fund from the things we would all love to fund but we just don’t have the revenue to do it.”
