Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

State budgets are put together by politicians. Thus, to a certain extent, they are political documents, not just ministerial ones.

Gov. Mark Warner has had a whale of a time putting together his first-ever biennial budget. Since taking office a recessionary year ago, he has had to cut away some $6 billion from a roughly $52 billion two-year spending plan. That’s no small chunk of cuts.

Warner came into office staring at a $3.8 billion revenue shortfall, and he and the General Assembly worked together during the 2002 legislative session to fill it. Then, as the national and state economies continued to sour, the governor was forced this past summer to cut about $850 million from his bureaucracies’ operations to offset the less-than-expected sums of monthly tax receipts flowing into the state treasury. Those expenditure cuts were necessary just so the state could stay on top of its bills. And now, as Warner heads into his second year in office, he’s had to find another $1.2 billion in cuts to keep the state’s books in check.

Warner, a Democrat, has been generally praised for his handling of a difficult situation. But just how has he gone about it? What are some of the more devilish details? And just how truly praise-worthy are his budget actions?

Let’s peel back the onion a bit. Let’s look for argument’s sake at transportation and education, two areas Warner has talked so much about for the past year.

First, recall, if you will, candidate Warner on the hustings in 2001 making so much of the fact that then-Gov. Jim Gilmore, a Republican, had relied on so-called “accounting gimmicks” to balance the budget. He accused Gilmore of turning to one-time fixes and, in some cases, newly found money that wouldn’t be available in future years to keep the books balanced, thereby delaying, even exacerbating, our budget troubles. All of this, Warner said, created what he has so frequently – and rightly – referred to as a “structural imbalance” in the budget.

So one would naturally assume that the new governor would go to great lengths to avoid a Gilmore approach to balancing the budget, that he wouldn’t rely on one-time fixes and gimmicks, and that he’d correct that dastardly structural imbalance. Right?

Well, how shocked would you be to learn that a whopping 45 percent of all “savings” in Warner’s new budget – some $939 million – come from one-time fixes? That’s right – nearly half.

Examples? Well, let’s get back to transportation and education.

Over the next two years, Warner has cut $63 million straight from the Virginia Department of Transportation. (That’s the broken-down road-building agency the governor has vowed to fix. Probably a little tough to do when its spigot is being drained.) These are the one-time cuts he imposed on VDOT in October and then again last month when he submitted his budget (about $33 million each round).

In one-time cuts to all transportation agencies – not just VDOT, but also DMV, airports, rail, etc. – more than $143 million has been sliced away over the next two years.

What about education? Well, let’s talk about education, both secondary and higher ed.

Warner has made much about his move to actually increase K-12 education spending by some $65 million in this budget, despite these lean times. So how did he do it?

Well, first, it should be acknowledged that there is indeed $65 million more going to secondary education. But in general funds, it’s just a tad more than $2 million in new money. The other roughly $63 million is coming from the Literary Fund – that’s the otherwise sacred pot of money that localities rely on for loans to build new schools and renovate existing ones.

This is a rather disturbing way to “increase” education funding, because the effect is to severely hamper one of the state’s primary school construction loan programs. The General Assembly last session left $5 million in this year’s Literary Fund and invested a bountiful $20 million in it next year.

While this year’s $5 million is still there, Warner took all but a mere $22,000 – that’s right, $22,000 – from next year’s $20 million. He pretty much raided the whole thing. And what would that $20 million have done? It’d have leveraged some $200 million in school construction projects across Virginia.

So, in effect, Warner is sending more money to classrooms – but he’s getting it from classrooms. Go figure.

What about one-time cuts to our colleges and universities? Well, they’ve faired worse than any.

Over about the last five years, there’s been roughly $460 million in new spending on our state campuses. Yet Warner’s cross-agency cuts in October and December hit higher ed disproportionately hard. Cuts to our colleges and universities account for a full 40 percent – about $302 million – of all across-the-board agency hits in the last year.

Nobody envies the job Warner and his finance team have had. Nobody doubts it’s been difficult to present a constitutionally mandated balanced budget in a day – indeed, a year – of dwindling tax dollars. Equally, though, nobody wants anything less than straight talk when it comes to the way in which that very budget has been balanced.

Yes, yes, budgets are more than just budgets; they’re political opportunities for their drafters to push and highlight those things nearest their hearts. Warner in recent weeks has touted his as being the best possible in a bad situation, one that preserves this and protects that.

And to listen to many who at least think they’re in the know – like editorial page writers – they’ve fully bought into Warner’s budget and they’ve held him up as being the one who’s righted all past wrongs, and they’ve done so arguably without looking too deeply into his budget’s details.

But if they fully realized that Warner’s done nothing to address the budget’s structural imbalance and that he’s grossly taken from the school construction fund and that higher ed has been so terribly hard hit, do you think the governor still would be getting two full scoops of praise? Or perhaps just one?

Warner has now handed over his budget to the General Assembly, who now gets a crack at it. Between now and late February, the legislature will put its own stamp on the state’s spending plan for the next two years.

The General Assembly’s plan may or may not be wildly different from the one Warner prepared. But regardless of what it looks like when all is said and done, it’ll be incumbent upon the legislature to spell out fully the way in which it has chosen to balance the budget.

Your thoughts?

The Bryant Archive

Call to post

New Year with no new taxes

Republican General Assembly should support black heritage, MLK programs

Trent Lott must resign as majority leader

Public health: our bounden duty

Towards a free market in higher education

Tax reform is overdue

Hear them roar

Referendum on taxation

What did Godwin do?

Gilmore and Sullivan

Warner's judges

Eastern stars

The wreck of old No. 39

It'll be Goode in the Fifth

The Wilder gamble

The politics of water

On Labor Day, coal miners and being a Republican

Shadow responsibilities

A time for all Virginians to pull together

The people versus the powerful in Northern Virginia

A media double standard?

Warner's California Ways

Bill Howell: the Un-Wesson