Warner, Assembly leaders beginning to harmonize

After a terribly divisive General Assembly session this past year, where Republicans and Democrats – and, regrettably, Republicans and Republicans – went to war over budget and tax policies, could it be that there’s a spirit of cooperation brewing for the 2005 legislative session?

Lest we read too much into it, some signs of such are beginning to show. Lately, we’ve heard a few common utterances come from Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, as well as three powerful Republicans: House Speaker Bill Howell, House Appropriations Committee chair Vince Callahan, and Senate Finance Committee chair John Chichester. This past winter, these guys were not so much on the same page, to say the least, so any signs now that they’re a bit in sync are welcome.

Let’s begin with Chichester, since he’s the first to have publicly offered ideas about the upcoming session.

A little more than a month ago, in late September, Chichester stood before a few hundred business and civic leaders in Richmond and suggested that two priorities for any budget surplus to be enjoyed this year and next would be ending the accelerated sales tax gimmick and speeding up the phased elimination of the state’s share of the sales tax on groceries.

Chichester is right in saying that the Assembly has held for much too long the sleight-of-hand practice of requiring some big retailers to remit their anticipated July sales-tax collections a month early. Doing so has allowed the state to close out its June-ending fiscal years appearing to have collected more for the treasury over the previous 12 months than is really the case. That gimmick was started a handful of years ago has been repeated annually. Scrapping it and returning to straight-faced accounting requires a one-time “honesty payment” of about $181 million.

Chichester also suggested that the Assembly’s proposed 1.5 percent cut in the state sales tax on store-bought food should be carried out in its entirety next year instead of being phased out by a half-penny per year for the next three years, which is the current plan. Lunging forward to cut the entire penny-and-a-half at once while the state has a healthy surplus is the right thing to do. The cost for doing so – that is, the amount the state won’t be collecting from taxpayers – is about $104 million.

Fast-forwarding a month or so, we’ve heard both Warner and Howell, on separate occasions, call on legislators to restrain themselves from spending the $700 million to $1 billion surplus that may accrue over the next two years. Over the last week or so, each encouraged delegates and senators to view the surplus more as anomalous growth than recurring revenue.

Their goal, of course, was to warn against going down the same kind of free-spending path that just a few years ago led to structural imbalances in our biennial budgets which, in turn, led to big cuts in core services and a threat to our historic AAA bond rating.

There have been reports recently that Warner and Howell have had a meeting or two to discuss the fiscal lay of the land. It’s right and proper for Virginia’s two most powerful leaders to get together on occasion and talk about affairs of state. To the extent their discussions have produced enough common understandings to minimize in ’05 the kind of legislative stand-off we saw last winter, well, that’s a good thing.

Additionally, we heard Callahan last week suggest that now’s not the time to spend like “drunken sailors.” The House’s head budget-writer also has seen how profligate spending can compound annually, creating the need for big-time cuts when the economy sours and revenues fall off.

And in case some missed it, Callahan also echoed Chichester’s two main points. He likewise suggested that first claims on any surplus should be fixing – once and for all – the accelerated sales tax budget trick as well as eliminating the entire 1.5 percent of the sales tax on groceries that currently goes to the state treasury.

So, to review, we have Warner, Howell, and Callahan calling for spending discipline, and we have Chichester and Callahan calling both for an end to the last main vestige of budget-balancing gimmickry and cutting the sales tax on food. So far, so good.

What we need, though, to round out this kum-ba-yah circle is Warner calling anew for an end to the budget tricks – which, to be fair, he’s done many times – and Chichester suggesting that now’s not the time to willy-nilly spend our surplus dough.

It’s nice to hear Warner and three of the Assembly’s top leaders saying lots of the same things as we head into the upcoming legislative session, even if they’re saying it at different times and in different settings.

What’d be exclamatory, though, is their standing side-by-side at a news conference laying out a common set of budget goals to be adopted when the Assembly convenes in January.

Okay, okay, let’s not press our luck.