‘We were down to nickels and dimes’

Quizzed by lawmakers as to why Gov. Butch Otter, in his budget recommendation this year, called for cutting state funding for child immunizations - a cut the Legislature approved, but thought would be offset for a year by stimulus money, which didn’t come through - Sara Stover, Otter’s Division of Financial Management analyst for Health & Welfare, said, “It literally came down to the last days of the governor’s recommendation. We had to balance a budget, and we were down to nickels and dimes. … It was a big policy issue … and we didn’t think it was necessarily a great thing to just leap in like that.” But, she said, in the end it was simply “a fiscal issue.”