Mike O'Neal was born January 16th, 1951 in Kansas City, Missouri. He was adopted as an infant by Ralph and Margaret O'Neal, a farm family from Manning, Kansas near Scott City. An only child, Mike lived on the farm until he was 4. Mike's dad had been farming with his dad and a brother but decided to give up farming and the family moved to Colby for a short time before moving to Scott City, where Mike's dad made a living in bread sales and owned and operated a home delivery dairy business. Mike attended public schools from kindergarten through high school in Scott City. Mike graduated #2 in his class at Scott Community High in 1969.

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Since the 2009 Regular session of the Kansas legislature adjourned April 3, we were handed more disappointing state economic news when the Consensus Revenue Estimating Group met April 17 to project revenues for the next year. Their verdict was the Kansas economy continues to suffer from the effects of the national recession and revenues will continue to fall off. The recession is expected to be "U-shaped" instead of "V-shaped", meaning that the low point of the recession will last longer than most recessions, given the national economic situation.

Accordingly, although we had passed a FY 2010 budget that balanced and provided ending balances of around $170M, at the time, the April 17 revenue report estimated that we would instead have a $328M deficit at the end of FY 2010 based on new revenue projections. As I'vereported before, Kansas is a cash-basis state and we must pass a balanced budget.

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