By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- If you think this has been a bad budget year for the state, just wait until 2010.

Local state legislators said Thursday that next year is shaping up to be even worse.

"We have received some [revenue] numbers already and the overall picture for next year is not a positive one," said Rep. Paul Luebke, D-Durham, during a panel discussion at Durham Tech on the state's fiscal status "The revenue we hoped we'd have is not there, and we may be looking at some additional program cuts."

Rep. Mickey Michaux, D-Durham, the senior chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said the state could be facing a budget shortfall of up to half a billion dollars by the time the legislature convenes next May for its short session.

With the state unemployment rate still high -- it's currently at 10.8 percent -- Luebke, chairman of the N.C. House's tax-writing Finance Committee, said North Carolina is collecting less income tax and also less sales tax, as cash-strapped residents make fewer purchases.

"These are very dangerous signs," he said. "More budget cuts may be necessary, including here at Durham Tech.

The two-year budget plan passed in August by the General Assembly already cut about $2 billion worth of spending. State Sen Bob Atwater, D-Chatham, said legislators understand that the cuts are taking their toll.

"We know when we made the cuts we didn't cover all the bases," Atwater said. "Especially in the mental health area, we came up short, and people are suffering."

The current $19 billion budget, as bad as it was, nevertheless was helped enormously by federal stimulus money, Michaux said. Without it, the state would have had to close public schools in April.

But the gift is now a kind of burden.

"When we got the stimulus money, in order to avoid more budget cuts, we put some of the money into ongoing programs," Michaux said. "When that money runs out, we're going to be back in a very deep hole."

That hole, he said, could be $2 billion by the opening of the 2011 session of the General Assembly.

Yet as bad as the situation has been -- Luebke termed the current economic crisis "worse than anything in the state since the Great Depression" -- the legislators all agreed it could have been worse, and it is worse, elsewhere.

"We're in bad shape, but not as bad as a lot of other states, like California and Michigan," Michaux said. "There are places where they had to lay off 25,000 state workers. We were able to keep most of our folks working."