Indiana Closes Fiscal Year With Record Reserves

INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana closed out its fiscal year with the highest level of budget reserves in state history. More than $400 millionrom those reserves will go to maintaining roads.

Indiana finished its 2016 fiscal year with $2.4 billion in reserve. Lt. Gov. Eric Holcomb says the state can now fulfill a promise put in place by this past legislative session’s road funding package.

“Finishing Fiscal Year 2016 at historic reserve levels will allow us to put $428 million dollars into road funding,” Holcomb says.

Releasing that money to roads will bring the reserves down to 11.5 percent of the state’s total budget – a number the Pence administration has, in the past, been uncomfortable with. But Office of Management and Budget director Micah Vincent says that’s not so this year.

“We looked at our levels of need and we saw that it was a really good opportunity to make this unique investment into roads,” Vincent says.

Fifty-five percent of the road funding money will go into the state highway fund; the rest will be used for a new matching grant fund for local road and bridge construction.