Clarksburg Exponent-Telegram – West Virginia was one natural gas boom away from facing the same kind of shortfall that had Kansas’s state government struggling to balance its budget earlier this month. Read
That’s according to Sean O’Leary, a fiscal policy analyst with the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.
West Virginia’s government has experienced a budget shortfall the past three years and is projected to face a shortfall again in 2016, O’Leary said.
“We had $100 million budget gaps some of those years, but the budget gaps would’ve been a whole lot worse had we not had that natural gas boom,” O’Leary said. “And if you go back and look at what they were projecting at that time, nobody anticipated the Marcellus boom. So we sort of lucked into only having $100 million budget gaps, as opposed to the bigger budget gaps they saw in Kansas.”
