09/07/2010 Bend

As thousands of Oregon students start school, candidate and former Governor John Kitzhaber releases his plan to reshape the state's budget, facing a $3 billion deficit. "Today for example we continue to take money out of education to pay for public safety and social service programs if we invest better and more wisely in families and kids and in schools we can reduce the cost of the other programs down stream," said Kitzhaber.

The plan follows a three step process. "We have to change our priorities, we have to decide where we want Oregon to end up ten years from now, we're going to have to restructure and overhaul state government in order to make those priorities work and we're going to have to continue to invest in our future over the next ten years," said Kitzhaber.

Kitzhaber outlines five priorities: stable funding for education beginning at birth, getting children ready to learn, close the achievement gap before it starts, lower the dropout rate while increasing post secondary education rates, and providing career paths that lead to family wage jobs in Oregon. Making this change, Kitzhaber says, won't come easy. "Well it's going to be difficult in the short term, we're going to have to do more with less, we're also going to have to do some things very, very differently, we're going to have to fund schools differently we're going to have to change the way we provide medical care we're going to have to make investments today that we might not see a return on for three or four years," said Kitzhaber.

If elected, Kitzhaber says he'll implement the plan immediately. The plan would require cost-benefit reports of every state program every year, the first would be due within 45 days of the election. "If we build this budget right next session we can avoid in the future having to deal with across the board cuts, we'll build based on a set of priorities the most important to the least important," explains Kitzhaber.

More details on his plan is available at  http://www.johnkitzhaber.com