Other highlights of Governor Carcieri’s proposed state budget include:

•Establish a $2-million Comprehensive Education Fund under the direction of the governor, speaker of the House and the Senate president to focus on how to finance schools, improve teacher quality, and meet challenges facing urban school districts.

•Take $968,000 owed to the Narragansett Indian Tribe over a three-year period and plug it back into the operating budget. The money is the tribe’s share of video slot machines at Lincoln Park, but tribal leaders have yet to decide if they want to accept the money.

•Increase by $4.3 million the amount of state scholarship money currently available to needy students and pump $5 million into a new merit-based scholarship program for low-income students who perform well on state tests, bringing the total available next year to $15,000.

•Add staff to the state police to maintain and run the state’s growing interoperable radio communications system and hire civilian analysts for homeland security and cyber crime investigations.

•Cut safety and emissions testing fees paid by motorists from $47 to $38.

•Increase professional licensing fees. Contractors’ licenses would go from $120 to $200 every two years. Social workers, speech pathologists, veterinarians, doctors and dentists would face similar increases.

•Raise by 30 percent the cost to obtain birth, death and marriage certificates.

•Attach a new $25 court cost fee to the dismissal by state traffic court of speeding tickets and other violations for motorists with good driving records.

•Raise the state’s cut on simulcast bets from 4.5 percent to 8.4 percent. The rate matches the fee for greyhound bets.

•Open the door for Charlestown to get a new neighborhood through the sale of 30 of Camp Pastore’s 50 acres. Estimated revenues are $3.4 million, based on turning the camp into 2-acre house lots.

•Delay an actuarially required contribution to a health-care fund to pay benefits to retirees. The move saves the state millions now, but makes it more difficult to pay those benefits in future years.

•Try to speed up repayments from hospitals for money fronted to them each year for state and federal expenses. $29.3 million is owed, some of it outstanding for up to eight years.

•End services from the Department of Children, Youth and Families when youths turn 18, instead of 21.

•Prevent Family Court from imposing sentences past age 18, instead of the current cutoff age of 21.