• Today, Tuesday, we are making our final revenue estimates for the new budget year.  We've heard from all of the experts, and the surprising thing was that both the Legislative Research Council and the Bureau of Finance and Management's estimates were quite close together.  The estimates do NOT predict more revenue than what we were counting on, which isn't particularly good news for education and Medicaid.  However, it does appear that the majority is interested in making nearly $14 million in one-time money available to education and Medicaid (about 1% increase the Governor's recommendation) and our universities, rather than sending it to reserves, so that was the encouraging news of the week.  We sent $47 million to reserves last July as a function of under-estimating revenues and over-estimating expenses.  We didn't overtly plan for that to happen, but it did because we were so conservative in our estimates.  Now that it's there, the Governor's philosophy of not spending reserves for anything but disasters kicks in, and the money isn't available for other needs.  The Legislature is taking several steps to assure that that doesn't happen to that extent for this coming fiscal year, but nevertheless sequester talk in the news is being repeated by the Governor in efforts to tamp down expectations of revenue and efforts to get additional money to education and Medicaid.
• One very troubling development has been the relative ease with which Senate Joint Resolution 2 has moved through the legislative process.  This would put on the ballot a constitutional amendment that would say that any tax increase voted on by

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