Preserving public education funding in Mississippi is front and center on the minds of local legislators as they and fellow lawmakers ponder cuts to vital state services.

Click here for text of Barbour’s State of the State address

“I’m dismayed over the education cut proposals,” Sen. Briggs Hopson, R-Vicksburg, said as he headed back to Jackson this morning after listening to Gov. Haley Barbour’s State of the State speech Tuesday night.

The state’s funding mechanism for K-12 schools, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, faces a cut of about 3.8 percent this year.

The first-term senator and member of the Senate Universities and Colleges Committee said he was satisfied with Barbour’s emphasis on fiscal discipline in the face of declining state income, but funding for elementary-level education must remain a priority, he said.

“We’ll have some belt-tightening to do,” Hopson said.

House Democrats supported a measure to divert $17 million from the state’s rainy day fund to shore up the higher education shortfall. Barbour wants the state’s $362 million reserve to stay intact for four years as insurance against a prolonged recession, and doesn’t want the reserve depleted in one year as could happen.

Rep. George Flaggs, D-Vicksburg, chairman of the House Banking and Finance Committee and member of the Appropriations Committee, said the transfer of funds is vital to keep school district and county-level officials from having to take up the slack on education in the form of additional tax levies. Flaggs also said the formulas in the MAEP, through which school districts are allocated most of their operational money, must be funded.

“It’s not just raining, it’s storming right now,” Flaggs said. “It is a state responsibility to fund MAEP.”

Local legislators agreed with Barbour on the concept of “belt-tightening” in general, but education and health-care loom as the toughest cuts.

A proposed hospital tax will figure prominently in the debate on Medicaid funding. It has a shortfall of about $90 million heading into this year’s regular session.

“We will have to look at Medicaid real hard this year,” state Rep. Alex Monsour, R-Vicksburg, said, adding specifics on where legislators will cut the budget won’t become clear until after intense negotiation.

“There’s no definitive answer on how we do this,” Monsour said.

One bill Flaggs filed in the session’s opening days included a measure to raise the excise tax on cigarettes by at least 50 cents a pack and dedicate the money to Medicaid.

“If we’d have passed it before, we wouldn’t be in this box,” Flaggs said. “I agree on belt-tightening, but we must remain bold and progressive in our thinking.”

Besides public education, cuts are possible to the Department of Health and some programs in the Department of Human Services.

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Contact Danny Barrett Jr. at dbarrett@vicksburgpost.com.