Education will be the top issue in this year’s legislative session, Gov. Butch Otter told reporters at the AP Legislative Preview this morning, and he’ll be proposing a five-year plan to implement the 20 recommendations of the education stakeholders task force he convened. “My budget will reflect exactly those guarantees, those promises, those trusted ideas that throughout the economic downturn that both myself and the Legislature indicated: That as the economy turned around, and as we had the resources available, we would obviously replenish, to the extent that we could each and every year, those funds that were reduced to education,” Otter said.

The task force did “a tremendous job,” Otter said. “And the job that they did is actually going to be a blueprint for us going forward.”