Nebraskans eager to trim budget

LINCOLN — Any Nebraskans worth their corn husks will tell you who needs to start at quarterback for the Husker football team.

And they're full of ideas on how to wrest the state out of its sticky, $334 million budget problem, judging from e-mails sent to reporters and to a state senator's Web site.

Heck, sell the state airplane, like that Sarah Palin did up in Alaska.

Or lower the salaries of the governor and other elected officials.

How about cutting back on cleaning state restrooms?

Or legalizing casino gambling?

Those were among the ideas sent unsolicited from readers or sent to State Sen. Jeremy Nordquist of Omaha, who sought out budget-cutting ideas.

The state employee who questioned why the restrooms at the State Office Building in Lincoln needed to be cleaned three times a day had a good idea, Nordquist said, as did the 3,000 other Nebraskans from 350 communities who offered suggestions on his NebraskaBudget.com Web site.

“I'm going to ask DAS (the Department of Administrative Services) about the restrooms when they come before us,” he said.

Other worthy ideas also will be pursued, Nordquist said, though maybe not in the special budget-cutting session that began Wednesday. The ideas might be too large of a change or fall outside the limitations of the narrowly crafted special session, he said.

But they can still be posed to state officials now.

Here are some money-saving suggestions:

Sell the state plane

The Nebraska Department of Aeronautics maintains three airplanes worth a total of approximately $2.8 million, though the biggest and most expensive, a 2001 Beech Craft King Air B200, is leased to the state by the University of Nebraska Foundation.

That leaves two smaller planes, a 1982 Piper Cheyenne and a 1977 Piper Navajo, worth about $800,000, in state hands.

The state spent $433,044 to gas up and maintain its fleet during 2008-09 and received $418,840 in lease payments from state agencies to use the planes.

Sen. Russ Karpisek of Wilber said eliminating the state planes might be penny-wise but pound-foolish — the governor and other state officials need a speedy, convenient way to connect with citizens in far-off reaches of western Nebraska.

“How often would anyone get out there otherwise?” Karpisek asked.

Reduce elected officials' salaries

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver recently said he would return 10 percent of his $130,000-a-year salary.

While nothing precludes Gov. Dave Heineman from returning a state paycheck, he said it would be difficult to formalize such a move.

The Legislature sets the salaries of constitutional officers, Heineman said, and changes would not go into effect until new terms for those offices began. In the case of the governor, who is paid $105,000 annually, that would be 2011.

“If there was an appropriate way to do it . . . but there isn't,” Heineman said this week.

Voters establish state senators' salaries. The current level is $12,000 per year. Next year, voters will decide if the pay should be increased to $22,000.

Furloughs, layoffs or cutting the work week

Nordquist said a four-day work week for state employees has worked fine in Utah, where citizens like the night hours in state offices.

Julie Dake Abel, executive director of the Nebraska Association of Public Employees, the largest state workers union, said layoffs and furloughs should be last-ditch solutions. She said that the state workforce is already “bare bones” and that cutting pay and eliminating jobs would intensify the joblessness already caused by the recession.

Get rid of state-owned cars or keep them longer

The state has been slowly reducing the number of vehicles in the Transportation Services Bureau. But using a state-owned car is much cheaper than renting or paying mileage to employees who use their own vehicles, said Carlos Castillo, director of administrative services.

Agencies, he said, can lease a compact Ford Focus for $170 a month, plus mileage, from the Department of Administrative Services.

The agency has 1,100 cars, vans and pickup trucks, which are sold on a rotating basis every five years. Maintaining the fleet costs $8.8 million annually, not including the dozens of vehicles owed by specific agencies such as the State Patrol and the Game and Parks Commission.

Five years, Castillo said, is the optimal span for getting a good sale price for a used state vehicle and avoiding expensive repairs.

Heineman is driven around in a 2009 Chevy Suburban that is leased for $850 per month or in a State Patrol SUV. That second SUV will soon be replaced by another SUV confiscated by the federal government, said Deb Collins, a State Patrol spokeswoman.

LEGALIZE CASINO GAMBLING

Kansas will soon open a state-owned casino to help address its budget woes, but don't plan on seeing that in Nebraska any time soon, said Karpisek, a proponent of legal gambling here.

He couldn't get a gambling bill out of his own committee last spring and answered a definitive “no” when asked whether casinos might be a budget-saver here.

Contact the writer:

402-473-9584, paul.hammel@owh.com