Good News Series: Justice & Public Safety State Budget Projections, IT, & Business Opportunities

Deltek Sr. Analyst Chris Cotner reports.

This is the final article in a multi-part series on justice and public safety (JPS) and homeland security (HS) state budgets. Having just wrapped up Crime Prevention Month, GovWin is offering this last piece of analysis to close the loop.

In deference to brevity, background and methodology can be found in previous articles, linked here, and above.

Taking a look at figure 1, above, the JPS & HS projection looks about the same as overall state budget projection data (here). With steady gains through FY 2011, there is a slight loss of -0.22 percent in FY 2012. Considering that all combined state budgets are experiencing a 2.11 percent drop in FY 2012, this slight loss for JPS & HS in FY 2012 looks a little more positive. Looking at the 95 percent confidence intervals, while possible for there to be an overall JPS & HS loss from FY 2013 to 2014, it is highly unlikely. In fact, the data indicate that FY 2013 should either be flat or have slight growth. Even better, by FY 2014, state JPS & HS budgets should be back to growing at an approximated 1% annual rate.

As mentioned earlier, doing state-specific projections becomes more difficult with a universal model. Simply, there are too many possible associated variables to accurately predict for each state. However, with our modeling, GovWin was able to provide a picture of projected budgets for some states. Before delving into that data, here are the actual JPS & HS budgets for all states from FY 2010 – 2013 (table 1, below – Subscribers have access to budget data on all states, here). Remembering that a direct comparison between states is difficult due to budgetary differences, this data is most useful to compare year-over-year changes for each state.

For the complete blog, go here.