Reporting on Hawaii’s looming budget deficit sent me looking for more info from other western states.

In Washington, Gov. Gregoire, a Democrat, has changed course in dramatic fashion. As reported by the Seattle Times:

Gov. Chris Gregoire, who once advocated boosting state spending by billions of dollars, has become the state’s budget-cutter in chief.

She’s rolled out unprecedented proposals to slash services to the poor, eliminate state agencies and restructure government as a way to close a budget shortfall approaching $5 billion.

On the other hand, I noted another story from the Seattle Times reporting on a recent annual Economic Forecast Conference. The leading long-term scenario sees the region building a new health care industry, drawing on its existing strengths. One big problem is that the region doesn’t have enough highly educated workers to fill the jobs they want to create, but at the same time education is taking a big hit in the short-term budget balancing process. Those cuts now could make future growth even harder to achieve. And that’s where we’re all stuck these days, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, I note that over in Nevada, where the gambling industry was supposed to keep everyone employed and happy, higher education is facing a potential 20% budget cut. That’s enough to force not just layoffs but the closing of campuses. So does this mean gaming won’t provide a magic solution to our budget woes here in Hawaii?

By the way, while reading about the situation in Washington, I stopped by one of my favorite Northwest news sources, Crosscut.com, which in turn led to a soruce I haven’t run into before, Publicola.

Then I stumbled over Public News Service.

The Public News Service (PNS) provides reporting on a wide range of social, community, and environmental issues for mainstream and alternative media that amplifies progressive voices, is easy to use and has a proven track record of success. Supported by over 400 nonprofit organizations and other contributors, PNS provides high-quality news on public issues and current affairs.

Last year the Public News Service produced over 4,000 stories featuring public interest content that were redistributed several hundred thousand times on 6,114 radio stations, 928 print outlets, 133 TV stations and 100s of websites. Nationally, an average of 60 outlets used each story. This includes our bilingual content, which is growing rapidly as we strengthen relationships with Spanish media outlets.

In addition, about one-third of our stories are picked up by national networks and redistributed across the country.

Both of these experiments appear to be producing solid reporting, and both are worth checking out.