BATON ROUGE - Higher education officials are breathing easier after receiving notice that their budgets would be cut only about half of what they were told two weeks ago.
Gov. Bobby Jindal on Tuesday afternoon laid out a plan for solving a $341 million deficit in the current year's budget by imposing a 3 percent across-the-board cut. He described the process as "the state needs to tighten its belt."
By passing the cuts around, instead of focusing on higher education and health care, the two largest budget items not protected by the constitution, higher education would be cut $55 million - instead of the $109 million announced two weeks ago. The Department of Health and Hospitals, which has the largest state budget, is to be cut $118 million, instead of $160 million.
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Mike Hasten • mhasten@gannett.com • December 31, 2008