HAWVER: What will the circles tell us?

Folks who follow Kansas government and politics are adding two circles to their calendars — Oct. 30 and Nov. 5 — to get ready for the juiciest, most politically charged numbers we’re going to get this year.

The first new circle (we presume you are smart enough to already have circled your anniversary) is Friday’s release of October tax-only revenues to the state. That’s the monthly peek at the current fiscal year’s health, which is already $96.5 million below estimates on which the current state budget is cast.

The second new circle: The release of Consensus Revenue Estimates for the remainder of this fiscal year — that’s through June 30, 2010, — and the official estimate of state revenues for the following state fiscal year (that’s FY ’11 in Statehouse argot) on which the governor is required to base his upcoming budget. The current-year estimate represents the size of cuts the governor will have to propose to lawmakers in January just get to FY ’11.

No one in the Statehouse is expecting either circled date to yield good news.

The October numbers will set off nearly a week of speculation by government-watchers about the Consensus Revenue Estimate. Already, lawmakers are considering they’ll be nearly $500 million short of revenues for the new fiscal year just to meet current spending levels and obligations — like bond payments, salaries, pension contributions and such. That whining about budget cuts by the last Legislature was just a tune-up for the coming session.

Some canny legislators already are feeling a dab foolish for allowing Gov. Mark Parkinson to borrow $700 million from state idle funds in July, which means there is no chance he’ll have to do spending cuts before the Legislature convenes in January. That means lawmakers are going to have to vote on cuts — rather than just keeping a straight face while blaming Parkinson for unilaterally making off-session cuts, with their attendant political heat.

But there’s a political trade-off here in that likely hundreds of millions of dollars of budget cuts are going to be neatly printed in January in the governor’s budget document for all to see and grumble about. They will clearly be the governor’s budget cuts — and possibly tax increases: His path out of the forest.

House members seeking re-election next year can wave the budget book and say, “the governor made us do it” and hope that brings them absolution in the voting booth. Senators? They’re in the middle of their terms and won’t run for re-election again until, hopefully, the economy is a little better.

Those two circles essentially will tell Kansans and Kansas politicos whether that third circle on the calendar will mean an anniversary dinner of steak … or chicken.

Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver’s Capitol Report. Visit his Web site at www.hawvernews.com