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Gov. Bev Perdue says she will be spending time looking for places to cut the state’s budget over the three-day Martin Luther King Jr. weekend.

She was speaking during and after a Council of State meeting today. Audio of her chat with reporters after the meeting is posted below.

Although the Department of Revenue reported some windfall numbers from corporate tax collections in December, state officials are worried the economy’s continued slow recovery could mean slower-than-anticipated tax collections even as demands on service increase.

“I’m not absolutely able to speak with certainty, but as I look at the numbers I see the sales tax numbers be really slow,” Perdue said.

Perdue said she was particularly frustrated with the state’s thwarted efforts to collect sales taxes from online purchases.

“It’s hard for me to understand why people pay for a tax on a towel or a bathrobe at Belks but they don’t pay when they order the same thing online,” she said.

As for the budget cutting exercise, Perdue told other members of the Council of State that her budget office had been trying to gather information needed to understand the state’s so-called continuation budget, the spending needed to maintain government services exactly where they are.

“We need structural cuts,” Perdue said. “We need to find programs that have outlived their purpose so we can then use those funds to do those things we need to do in the 21st century.” Perdue said she and her budget staff would be looking for programs that duplicated other efforts, outlived their use or were simply someone’s pet project to begin with.

“If we can’t get to the budget that we, then it’s about time we just tore it all down to … zero-based budgeting and start over, which would be very difficult, take a lot of time,” she said.

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Also during the Council of State meeting, several of the 10 statewide elected officials had to recuse themselves from voting. One item that allowed BB&T to place an ATM on N.C. State’s campus prompted at least three members to disqualify themselves from voting, including the governor, lieutenant governor and secretary of state.

“I’m really troubled by that,” Perdue said. Her office asked for, and got, an Ethics Commission opinion about when to recuse oneself. According to a lawyer for the governor, the commission advised that if a member of the Council of State owned more than $10,000 in a company’s stock – the threshold for reporting it on disclosure forms – then that member should not vote on the item.

“There has to be some kind of test (about) what I could influence if I own more than $10,000 worth of shares in one of these banks, which I do,” Perdue said.

The standard in the commission’s current opinion, she said, lacked a certain measure of common sense.

“We’ve asked the Attorney General and the Ethics Commission to go back and help us come up with some parameters,” Perdue said.

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Perdue also talked about her understanding of the current state of health reform, especially as it involved federal funding for state Medicaid programs.

You can listen to her talk about all these topics using the player below.