roanoke.com Real Politics / Preston Bryant

FEB. 3, 2003

Republicans remake Warner budget

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

Assembling a state budget in such a tough year is not easy. Gov. Mark Warner found it difficult to make up the $2.1 billion revenue shortfall, and so did the General Assembly.

Alas, the Republican-controlled legislature -- whose constitutional responsibility it is to balance the books, not the governor's -- has taken the governor's proposed two-year, $52 billion spending plan and improved it considerably. (Both the House of Delegates and Senate separately propose revisions to a governor's recommended budget. The differences are then ironed out.) Warner offered up his version of the budget in late December, and the legislature has been revising it since then.

Obviously, the top priority for all legislators is public education. While the governor's recommended budget proposed $65 million in additional funds for education, he got that money, oddly, in part by raiding the Literary Fund, the pot of money used for low-interest loans for school construction. That's right - he stole money from classrooms to send to classrooms.

The money set aside for school construction, however, is not a line item the legislature wants to decimate. So the House proposes restoring $12 million to the Literary Fund, which will leverage some $120 million for school construction and renovation projects across the state.

The General Assembly also recognized the importance of financial aid to many Virginia families trying to pay college tuition bills. The House proposes an additional $5.7 million in financial aid; the Senate $3 million. When the differences are reconciled, there will be at least $70 million each year available in state tuition help.

In dealing with what has been the biggest political football of the legislative session -- Warner's closing 12 of the 73 DMV offices -- the General Assembly has allocated funding for their reopening. The House offers up funds to put back in business all closed offices by April 1, as well as restoring Wednesday operating hours (which previously had been eliminated) to all offices. While the Senate also proposes reopening the 12 shuttered offices, it does not suggest restoring Wednesday's operating hours.

State employees also win in the General Assembly's budget revisions. Despite Warner's promise to never prepare a budget without salary increases for state employees, he's failed to do so on both occasions he's had the opportunity.

The General Assembly, however, has not forgotten the nearly 100,000 state employees, state-supported local employees, and college faculty. The House is proposing a 2.5 percent salary increase for these hard-working folks while the Senate is suggesting 2.0 percent. (It all depends on state revenues picking up as the economy improves.) State employees, it should be remembered, have not had an increase in three years. They deserve one.

Perhaps the most difficult area of the budget is that dealing with health care and social service -- hospitals and nursing homes as well as the mentally and physically handicapped. It's an extraordinarily complex area, especially where Medicaid is involved, but no part of the budget impacts Virginia's less fortunate citizens any more than this one.

Warner's proposed budget generally recommended cuts of more than $400 million in health care and social services. This included some $38 million in direct cuts to services for the elderly and mentally and physically handicapped.

Last year, Medicaid funds for hospitals, nursing homes, and pharmacies, which help ensure healthcare to the neediest, were cut by $127 million due to the economic slump and resulting budget crisis. This year, Warner proposed another $150 million in Medicaid cuts. While it's admittedly difficult to balance the budget without reducing health care and social services, the General Assembly found Warner's recommendations generally unacceptable.

So the legislature has moved to restore some $74 million in cuts to hospitals, nursing homes, and pharmacies, and it is investing a great deal in additional funds to go toward the nearly 2,000 mentally retarded Virginians on a waiting list for community-based (instead of institutional) care. The House proposes an additional $6 million to assist the mentally retarded; the Senate an additional $7 million.

Last, in the historically hard-pressed area of natural resources -- where we now spend substantially less than one percent of our overall state budget -- the legislature is restoring more than $8 million in Warner's cuts. Lots of environmental initiatives, such as water quality programs, acquisition of open space lands, and state parks' operations, have been spared.

The General Assembly will adjourn on Feb. 22. The House and Senate will reconcile their budget differences between now and then.

While there are never enough taxpayer dollars to do all that is necessary (much less desired), all in all, House and Senate Republicans have improved Warner's spending plan, concentrating especially on public education, the state workforce, healthcare, and the environment.

This by no means, however, suggests that our budget woes are over. They'll be with us for several years to come as we continue struggling to get past the lingering effects of the national economic slump.

So this time next year, we'll be right back here trying our best to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Hopefully, the economy will continue improving and neither the governor's nor legislators' challenges will be as difficult.

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