COLUMBUS – The national economy’s collapse into recession has blown a $640 million-dollar hole in Ohio’s budget for 2009, Gov. Ted Strickland said Monday. The damage is expected to grow to a multibillion dollar deficit for the next biennial budget that will be drafted in early 2009.

While he didn’t announce more budget cuts during the press conference at the Statehouse, Strickland said his cabinet is preparing to consider cuts and that he will meet with legislative leaders to talk about what to cut and what to spare.

“Our great state is confronted with challenges of historic proportions,” Strickland said of a revenue shortfall not experienced in more than 40 years.

To help address the immediate budget shortfall, Strickland wrote a letter to congressional leaders and President-elect Barack Obama asking them to give needy states federal grants. Strickland and other governors will meet Obama in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Strickland defended his administrator’s budget record by saying it has already trimmed $1.27 billion from the current budget and enacted jobs and energy spending packages that will create jobs in Ohio. Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher said the private sector has begun to request money from those packages.

As for the next budget, Strickland said for both 2010 and 2011 his administration expects a deficit of between $4 billion $7.3 billion – the former figure including 10 percent spending reductions by most state agencies.

As for areas of the budget that may be off limits to cuts, Strickland said decisions about what will be spared the knives can only come by consensus with legislators.

“Given the circumstances we face I think that’s going to require consensus among the legislative bodies as well as my office,” he said. “That’s why what we’re trying to do now is lay out the problem. This is not an effort to alarm or to exaggerate.”

Strickland said he’s still opposed to tax increases.

The National Bureau of Economic Research said the recession begain in December 2007.