Governor Phil Bredesen says several years of painful state budget cuts may eventually lead to an opportunity for his successor to reshape the way Tennessee spends its money.
If the recession were milder, Bredesen says the state’s budget trimming would have been shallow enough to allow a quick bounce back to business as usual. Instead, he says the state has had to make an effort to find new ways of making government work on less money and fewer people.
“We have cut so far and so deep in things that when the money does come back there really is going to be a chance to sort of pick some new directions and not just be funnelling money into the old things.”
That chance is unlikely to come before Bredesen’s second and final term ends in January. He says projections show state funding likely won’t return to 2007 levels until 2014.
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