Everything might be coming up roses in some states, but for Pennsylvania legislators, all they see is a never-ending field of weeds as the clock ticks down to a June 30 budget deadline.

Faced with a deficit of now more than $3 billion, legislators are trying to explain how their rosy predictions for tax and other revenue came up embarrassingly short. In the process, it has made a bad situation even grimmer than it had been last year.Both the state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale and state Treasurer Joe Torsella have confirmed what uneasy state legislators suspected is the case: The state's general fund balance is dangerously low, and state officials may have to seek private funding to keep the commonwealth afloat.In a pointed letter to all 253 state legislators, the two fiscal officers said that the state will probably need to borrow as much as $3 billion to "maintain routine budgeted operations between July 2017 and April 2018."They cautioned that the situation has continued to deteriorate during the past four years, with each year requiring progressively more borrowing over longer periods.They explained that in the past the state treasury has been able to keep a lid on borrowing costs by taking lines of credit from the long-term investment fund, but, they added, the borrowing needs for the next fiscal year will probably exceed the fund's lending capacity and require the state to find more costly public lending alternatives.They strongly urged the legislators to come up with a 2017-18 budget that addresses the state's increasingly dire budgetary challenges, rather than kicking the can farther down the road and creating an even more fiscally unsound scenario.Deep into the current fiscal year, the state Revenue Department reports that budgetary expectations are 4 percent lower than even the lean years following the Great Recession of 2007-08.So, how did we get to this sorry state? There is plenty of blame to go around. The state has been mired in deficit mode since the recession, created by sluggish growth, lower than expected tax collections, lower revenues than projected, rising health care costs and the continuing public pension deficits.Although it will take years before we see any positive outcomes, legislation signed on June 12 by Gov. Tom Wolf enacting a type of hybrid pension plan for state workers and public school employees is considered a step in the right direction. Not everyone agrees, but this is the compromise deal that state legislators and the governor have struck.State officials were hoping and praying that when taxpayers made their 2016 tax payments in April that there might be a silver lining, but, no, if anything, the revenues did not approach projections.The Revenue Department believes that businesses may have pushed profits and capital gains payments to this tax year and payable in 2018 in the event a tax cut is enacted at the federal level.Officials had also hoped that a pickup in economic activity might translate into greater state sales tax collections, but that turned out to be wishful thinking, too.This year's budget is about 5 percent higher than last year's. In putting together his budget, Wolf projected a 4 to 5 percent growth rate, which has come up woefully short of that pie-in-the-sky estimate.When putting together the 2016-17 budget last year, the state adopted a $650 million tax package that bumped up cigarette taxes by a buck a pack. The cigarette tax never generated the overly optimistic estimates projected in the budget.Nor did the gambling tax projections, which were way off the mark.Efforts to expand small games of chance were ballyhooed to raise millions, but potential licensees balked, and revenues came up 99 percent short of expectations.Then there were the ever-present sleight-of-hand transfers, bookkeeping manipulations and postponed payments, along with spending cuts, all of which have damaged Pennsylvania's credit rating making borrowing more expensive.As distasteful and unpalatable as all of this is, legislators plan to hang tough on their pledge of no increase in the broad-based income and sales taxes, especially since all 203 members of the state House of Representatives and 25 of the 50 state senators face re-election in 2018. The question is: Will they have any alternative, when push comes to shove, to meet the June 30 budget deadline?By Bruce Frassinelli |

tneditor@tnonline.com