If former state budget director Duane Goossen is correct, hundreds of candidates running for governor and the Kansas House will spend the next five months fighting for the privilege of enacting some combination of spending cuts and tax increases soon after they take office Jan. 1, 2015.

Goossen, who handled the state’s finances for the three governors who preceded Gov. Sam Brownback, told a League of Women Voters gathering Tuesday that based on recent revenue collection shortfalls, he doesn’t believe the state will be able to implement the budget, passed by legislators just a month ago, that goes through June 2015.

"I don’t think there’s going to be enough money in the bank for the state to make it all the way through Fiscal Year 2015 and cover the budget that has been approved," Goossen told a crowd of about 50 at the McCrite Plaza retirement community. "Something is going to have to happen already now in this (coming) fiscal year to keep the state balanced and keep the checkbook above zero."

Legislators were already planning to spend more than the state was projected to take in in tax collections in FY 15 and make up the difference with reserves held over from the current fiscal year.

But April and May revenue came in more than $300 million below projections, digging into the reserves lawmakers thought they would have.

Brownback’s interim budget director, Jon Hummell, said last week that the state still had enough to get through June 2015, though not by much.

But Goossen said Tuesday that Kansans should have little confidence in the approximately $55 million cushion now projected because the last two months have been so far below projections.

Brownback and Kansas Revenue Secretary Nick Jordan have blamed the recent low revenue collections on federal tax policy that spurred Kansans to realize what capital gains income they could before 2013, thereby bumping up last year’s tax returns and dropping this year’s.

Goossen, who predicted such a dip months earlier, said it doesn’t explain the full extent of the drop in revenue from one fiscal year to the next, or the fall so far below projections.

"We also could have experienced more of a loss from not taxing ‘pass-through’ business income than anybody knew," Goossen said.

That income tax exemption, estimated to apply to about 191,000 business owners, was part of tax policy spearheaded by Brownback and passed in 2012. The current fiscal year was the first in which the changes were in effect for the full 12 months.

More income tax cuts are scheduled to take effect each of the next several years, as the governor and others approach a goal of eliminating the state income tax. Brownback and other conservatives have espoused a supply-side economic view that reducing the tax will ultimately result in more state tax revenue through other sources because of growth in population and business activity.

But the governor also fought to make permanent most of a temporary sales tax and cut some income tax credits and deductions to cushion the revenue blow until such growth materializes.

Goossen said the current budget picture would have been "substantially worse" if the Legislature hadn’t made those adjustments last year.

Still, he said legislators will have to make some difficult choices to keep state government running through the end of FY 2015, and then even more difficult choices in forming a budget for July 2015 through June 2016. Shifting money from other places like the state highway fund, he said, is probably no longer a viable solution to hold down state general fund expenses, he said, noting that the Republican-led Legislature’s budget for the coming fiscal year substantially raised general fund spending.

"We’ve got quite a conservative Legislature," Goossen said. "For a conservative Legislature to push spending up like that in the face of dropping revenue means they really feel like they didn’t have many alternatives."

Goossen said about one-third of the spending increases came from the court-ordered K-12 public education equalization funding. The state’s contributions to the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System also increased.