Missouri’s final tab for the Joplin tornado and the 2011 flooding has proven to be much smaller than what Gov. Jay Nixon anticipated.
Figures provided to The Associated Press by Nixon's budget office show that the state's share for the disasters is a little more than $36 million. That's only a quarter of the $150 million that Nixon set aside in the budget in 2011.
Nixon's budget director Linda Luebbering says there was no dollar-for-dollar tracking of how the rest of the money was used. She says it simply got rolled into the general revenue pool for government operations and services.
Legislative budget leaders say Nixon's $150 million set-aside was an unnecessary budget manipulation.