Following the end of this year’s Iowa legislative session, lawmakers agreed on an over $7.1 billion budget for the current fiscal year.

However, the figures from the Revenue Estimating Conference reduced their projections by $121 million earlier this week.  District 47 Representative Chip Baltimore says he’s not surprised by the lower numbers, which are mainly due to the softening revenues in the agriculture industry.  He points out that recent announcements of layoffs from major farm implement manufacturers like Deere and Company, as the experts in forecasting what the long-term effects will be in the farming community.

He adds that several House Republicans tried to prepare for the possibility of declining revenue during the session.

“That is one of the main reasons why we’re so stringent upon a very tight budget.  We knew the projections back then were tenuous, but if there was any danger in those numbers, it wasn’t that they were going to be too low, it was going to be that they were too high.”

Baltimore believes that if this trends continues, it will be another difficult year to set the next budget.

“It’s going to be another challenging year for us.  But again, this is exactly the scenario that we have to be very, very cautious about when we are setting budgets six months to a year and a half in advance.”

The Governor will use the December REC figures to propose his budget before the start of the next legislative session in January.