Governor Fletcher has proposed spending $10 million of the projected $401 million surplus on retraining for Ford workers in Louisville. It's one incentive to try and keep the two Louisville Ford plants off the company's future chopping block. As you'd expect, Louisville lawmakers support the $10 million in training money, mainly because Ford has 9,000 employees (voters) working at its Louisville plants.

Here's the dilemma: How do you convince lawmakers who don't want to spend the projected surplus to fund one project (the Ford training money) while turning down all of the other groups who are clamoring for money to be stuffed into the state budget? Louisville legislators will claim their money is needed now to show Ford officials the state is serious about negotiating a deal to keep the two plants open. But Governor Fletcher has a plan to spend about $200 million on several other pet projects, many of which he considers "emergencies". House budget committee chairman Harry Moberly, Speaker Jody Richards and Senate President David Williams have all said they'd rather not open up the budget, prefering to hold on to any expected surplus until 2008, when all worthy projects and programs will be reevaluated TOGETHER to determine which ones should be funded in a new state budget. In other words, Louisville lawmakers will have a tough time telling their colleagues that the $10 million for Ford/Louisville is more worthy than the myriad of other proposals on the table.