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

May 3, 2004

Tax vote and its aftermath

By Preston Bryant
ROANOKE.COM COLUMNIST

The air hung oddly over the state capitol last week. The General Assembly took final actions on a tax bill that left most everyone relieved, but hardly anyone happy. And when all was said and done, everybody knew that all really wasn't said and done.

All that happened over a couple of pretty intense days was both simple and complex. The work to be done would involve, theoretically, just a few votes. Positioning for those votes, however, would prove unbelievably difficult. And then there would be the post-vote political questions -- some call it fallout -- to be answered, with the questions themselves being as broad as the time for answering them uncertain.

It was on Monday that the Senate Finance Committee amended the $972 million revenue bill the House of Delegates had sent them weeks earlier. The committee added a few hundred million to it (or not, depending on how you count it) and then unanimously sent it to the full Senate for consideration.

It was the next day, Tuesday, that the Senate overwhelmingly approved what its finance committee had done and sent the revised bill back to the House for a final blessing. If such a blessing were to come, it'd most likely hasten an end to the historic budget standoff that has kept the western world's oldest, continuously meeting democratic legislature in session longer than it's ever been. If not, then a government shutdown, in the opinion of many, was all but certain.

To boot, the Senate also would send the House a bill to freeze the popular -- but misleadingly costly -- car-tax relief program, making delegates' day of voting even more dicey. The bill proposed to cap the ever-escalating car-tax payouts to local governments at $950 million annually, even though the program at its inception was promised only to cost the state about $620 million a year.

The House deliberations on the two pieces of legislation began at 3 pm and ended six-and-a-half hours later. The course of the day involved only a handful of votes, but there was lots of stop-and-go in between, contributing to the final fraying of nerves that had long been set on edge.

The 100-member House passed the billion-dollar-plus tax bill with a mere 52 votes. The vote to freeze the car-tax program passed with 51.

With the tough votes taken and the revenue brouhaha decided, House-Senate budget negotiators could resume their weeks-long, broken-down discussions on how to spend it. And a government shutdown has, in all likelihood, been avoided.

The day ended long after night had begun. Senators and delegates were exhausted and drained. Few hung around. Most walked straight from their chambers to their cars and headed for their hinterland homes, embarking on long drives despite the late hour.

During the days leading up to the unfortunately historic votes, legislators spent most of their days on the telephone with each other, discussing one-on-one or in conference calls the pros and cons, political and practical, of what faced them. During the days just after the votes, few called at all. Enough was enough, and everybody simply wanted to get back to their otherwise normal lives.

But it's not going to be that simple. There's still work to be done and political waters to be navigated. Miles to go before anyone sleeps.

There's still the state budget that's to be negotiated to completion and voted on by the House and Senate, all of which should take place this week. It seems that even a few of the legislators who voted against the tax bills are now crowing that public schools may end up with $1.5 billion more than they had last year and that nearly a billion dollars more will be spent on health care. They're also happy that colleges and universities will get hundreds of millions more to accommodate the tens of thousands of new students heading their way and that law-enforcement officers will get long-overdue raises.

Also still looming on the horizon are the political uncertainties. Folks from all sides are threatening to "go after" those who voted both for and against the tax bills. The anti-tax forces have pinned to their bulletin boards the list of legislators -- Republicans and Democrats, delegates and senators -- who voted for the tax compromise that's seemingly ended the budget stalemate and kept the government open.

The latest political phenomenon to emerge, however, is that Main Street types -- the deep-pocketed, big business crowd -- are vowing to cut off the political cash to those who voted against new investments in public schools, higher education, workforce training, health care and public infrastructure, and infuse with overly generous support those who did. No longer, they say, will their backing be taken for granted. And, moreover, a number of these fed-up, pinstriped folks are taking it a step further, planning to take a page from others' playbooks and recruit "pro-Virginia" primary challengers to run against incumbent "nay-sayers," both Republicans and Democrats, delegates and senators.

It seems that for a little while longer, the air will continue hanging oddly over Virginia's statehouse. These have been strange times, with strange bedfellows producing unpredictable outcomes.

At some point, though, the world will right itself again, and shortly thereafter Virginia's politics will return to its traditional ways. It will do so for better or worse.

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