State budgets tend to be a lagging indicator of the shape of the economy.
“If you think about states collecting income taxes, that trails the economy by 12 months,” said Paul Christman, director at Quest Software’s state and local division.
If the incomes in a state go down, the lower tax revenues won’t show up for a year, when taxes are collected.
So despite all the hoopla about the housing market tailspin in Florida, it hasn’t trickled down yet into budgets in Florida’s Orange County, said Joe Giovanelli, management information systems manager at the county tax collector’s office.
The county’s budget is approved by the Florida Department of Revenue, and Giovanelli said he hasn’t yet seen a slowdown. Nonetheless, the county is streamlining operations by consolidation. Communication between the main office and the agencies has improved substantially, Giovanelli said. Consolidating servers onto eight Hewlett-Packard blade servers also cut tape backup time in half.
The county is even consolidating eight county agencies’ copiers, fax machines and scanners, which were growing old and required expensive maintenance. It is replacing them with HP multifunction printers that can fax, scan and copy.
“But I’ll be honest with you,” Giovanelli said. “We haven’t really saved any paper.”
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