For all the information doled about Gov. M. Jodi Rell in her budget address Wednesday to lawmakers, by her budget staff in two separate briefings for reporters, and in the flurry of emailed press releases that followed, there's a pretty huge chunk missing.

That is this: the governor and the legislature agreed last fall to borrow $1.3 billion in cash to make the two year budget balance out by the end of fiscal 2011. The $1.3 billion was to be secured with future revenues from sources that were left unnamed in the budget passed by Democrats, the budget Rell helped negotiate but then permitted to become law without her signature.

On Wednesday, reporters were told repeatedly that the source of the money against which the state will borrow would be revealed sometime in the afternoon. As of 8:06 p.m., it hasn't been.

Now, they're busy, and I'm sure they'll release this information soon. (Right guys?) But it was a little strange to see how lackadaisically the absence of this information was received by the legislature, to say nothing of the fact that the governor just left it out.

In Rell's budget address, she proposes new rules (many would argue they are actually unnecessary) to rein in state bonding, on the argument that Connecticut has borrowed too much. In the same speech, Rell didn't even mention that all of the relatively small measures she's using to make the 2010-11 biennial budget balance on paper only work because we're about to borrow another $1.3 billion to cover operating expenses. And not many legislators seemed all that curious about where that money's going to come from.

Some were, though.

"It just shows you the budget's not even really a budget," said Rep. Christopher Coutu, R-Norwich, who went on to offer fairly pointed criticism of one of Rell's other gambits: deferring $100 million in payments to the State Employee Retirement System this year in order to free up money for other spending.

"The securitization is why Moody's and Fitch said we have a negative outloook on our bond rating," said Coutu. "And you can point to the $100 million that they just agreed to take out of the pension fund, too. I think that's foolish. The $1.3 billion is just like everything else. The only option left is figuring out a way to make government more efficient, and cutting."

Another Republican was even more critical of securitization: Tom Foley, the Greenwich businessman now seeking the party's nomination to succeed Rell as governor. He had strong words for the spending habits of the Capitol and the current occupant of the office on the second floor:

"I think that's a huge mistake," Foley said of going forward with the $1.3 billion in securitization. "It's very imprudent. That's borrowing money from our children to pay for our current expenses.

"The governor is head of the Bond Commission. She decides what gets borrowed, and I think to borrow money for current expenses to avoid reducing the cost of government is very imprudent," he continued. "I say don't do it, and that forces the Democratically controlled legislature and the governor to work together and make the cost reductions we need to make."

Rep. Cameron Staples, D-New Haven, the co-chairman of the Finance Committee, isn't categorically opposed to securitization, but said it must come from some new source of revenue, rather than siphoning away existing tax or fee revenue to create an even larger deficit once the current budget expires.

"If we're going to securitize a revenue stream, it should be a new revenue stream," Staples said. "Otherwise we're just stealing from ourselves. if we need to create new revenue and leverage it, it may not be the worst idea, but we haven't seen the details yet. We need to see that."

Proposals passed around the Capitol would use some of the revenue from Rell's proposal to add Keno to the state lottery system for securitization. That and other reforms to give merchants and customers greater access to state gambling could yield from $92.5 million to $116 million, according to a summary of proposals made to the Connecticut Lottery Corp.

But OPM officials say they won't take all the money to back their $1.3 billion from the lottery system. Some of it will have to come from elsewhere. And until those officials say where the rest is coming from, neither the legislators nor their constituents have all the information they deserve about this budget.

Update:

And... it's out. The 11-page report from OPM reviews a handful of funding options and settles on two: temporarily "capturing" some of the surcharges on Connecticut ratepayers' electric bills, which is clearly the preferred option, or developing new revenue through the additions and modifications to the lottery to support bonds. The strong wording of the report suggests the administration would not approve any plan that captures general fund revenues to fund bonds, primarily because, to the bond ratings that already have Connecticut on notice, that might look like the move that finally gets the state downgraded. More on this in the a.m.