The recent budget surplus of $517 million may not sway the upcoming election, but experts say the gubernatorial winner will have difficult budget decisions to make in the future.

The biannual budget released last Wednesday showed that the budget balance is worse than last year’s more than $700 million surplus, but slightly better than in previous years, Wisconsin Budget Project director Jon Peacock said.

“It’s positive news that the state has a surplus, but it’s more than 200 million below what they’d been anticipating when they passed the tax cuts and the state expects to spend about 560 million more than it takes in,” Peacock said. “So there’s still a potential that the state will be in the red by the end of this fiscal year if it doesn’t find a way to make some cuts.”

The reason for Wisconsin’s imbalance between spending and revenues in the last year or two is because the state enacted fairly large individual tax cuts and more recently enacted a cut in the technical college property tax, the president of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance Todd Berry said.

Berry said regardless of who becomes governor after the election, they will face a budget situation which is “not dire,” like it was in 2010, but there will not be any leftover money.

“We were able to cut income and property taxes by balancing the budget with surplus we carried over, but obviously you can’t do that forever which is why the rubber hits the road next year,” Berry said. “A governor in the next year or two is not going to have that big of an effect on the Wisconsin economy. They may long term, but not in the short run.”

Looking ahead, balancing upcoming budgets will likely require some “painful choices,” Peacock said.

Unless there’s a “miraculous upcharge” of the economy, the state will either have to find a way to raise tax revenue, make a lot of cuts or freeze program funding right away, Peacock said.

“The state will balance the next budget and they’ll find ways to do that and the sky won’t fall but it’s going to require some difficult choices, and they’re going to have to put a squeeze on funding for universities, healthcare and K12 education,” Peacock said. “It’s unfortunate that it could have been avoided if they hadn’t used up the surplus before it even materialized.”

Although 5 percent of registered voters still remain undecided about the gubernatorial election, according to the most recent Marquette Law School Poll, the budget surplus will likely have a minimal effect, Berry said.

The majority of swing voters fall into two categories, Berry said. Within the group, a large percentage will either not vote at all or they are considered low information voters and are unlikely to be turned in to the twists and turns of the campaign trail.

“I don’t think [the budget] is going to have a major impact,” Berry said. “It’s all going to come down to which side can get its voters out: more tactics than issues.”