Iowa lawmakers continue to discuss how to cut $117 million from the state’s budget for the current fiscal year.

District 24 Senator Jerry Behn says they are put in a difficult situation, due to a time crunch.

“The first six months of the fiscal year have already expired. So those departments have been spending at the rate they were given and so now, the last six months they’ve got to make up for the first six months. So it ends up doubling up the issue with them having to reduce a certain amount of money.”

He believes the reasons for the shortfall are because the revenues aren’t coming in like they were predicted to do and departments were budgeting to use one-time funds for ongoing expenses.

“You start digging yourself into a hole and as the ending balance continued to go down, there were many of us that warned and just kept saying, ‘You can’t do that.’ Well now the day of reckoning is here.”

Governor Terry Branstad said in his State of the State Address that he didn’t want to reduce any money for kindergarten through 12th grade education funding. Behn says if they don’t consider that $2.5 billion part of the budget, that makes it even tougher to find cutbacks.

You can hear more from Behn on today’s Community State Bank in Paton Let’s Talk Greene County program.