Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 22, 1991 TAG: 9102220633
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On the other hand, though details of the plan remain scanty, it does not seem exactly a profile in courage.
The proposal worked out by a conference committee of senior legislators includes the $200 million "rainy day" reserve that Gov. Wilder had written into the budget last year and that he vehemently insisted must not be touched, even as state revenues continued to plunge.
It abolishes a mandatory furlough program, bitterly opposed by state employees. It restores $45 million in state aid to education and $12 million in financial aid to public and private colleges. To help close the revenue shortfall, it cuts state agencies' spending by another $104 million.
Although the deal requires Wilder to use the reserve to avoid further spending cuts and layoffs if tax revenues continue to decline through the summer, the budget compromise - assuming it's approved by the full General Assembly - protects the governor's fiscal-conservative bragging rights. He had threatened to use his line-item veto powers to save the $200 million set-aside. His national audiences doubtless will appreciate that he stood his ground against those ready to raid it.
Unfortunately, Wilder's set-aside fund - ostensibly based on an excess of revenue above what the 1990 assembly planned to spend - is now being preserved by fiscal chicanery: taking money from a trust fund for public school construction, borrowing to keep such construction going, and now - under the conferees' agreement - cutting another $104 million out of agencies' budgets.
When Wilder first established his rainy-day reserve, it was thought the money might have to go for court-ordered repayment of state income taxes previously levied on federal retirees. It was a sound idea to have such a fund; it's still a sound idea, in principle. But with cuts in state services and programs slicing deeper and deeper, and spending for education dropping to dangerous levels, the assembly should not have needed Willard Scott to tell them the rainy day has arrived.
The Senate Finance Committee's budget took the more reasonable approach, cutting the reserve by half and using half to reduce budget cuts. The conferees ought not to have caved in to Wilder. Meanwhile, their proposed restoration of $45 million for public education and $12 million for higher education is of course welcome, but too little to offset planned reductions.
A more courageous departure from Wilder's budget plan might have included, for example, Fincastle Sen. Dudley Emick's proposal to raise the sales tax by a half-cent and devote the revenue to public education. Browbeaten to go along with the governor's no-tax-increase pledge, legislators didn't give Emick's bill a glance.
Wilder's furlough plan wasn't given the chance it deserved, either. But rejecting it showed no bravery. Lawmakers had been under acute pressure from state workers to kill Wilder's plan. As one legislator put it, "There are 100,000 state employees and they all vote." With all 140 legislative seats up for election in November, the budget conferees weren't standing up to the governor so much as they were buying incumbent-protection.
The budget deal leaves it up to agency heads to decide whether to furlough or lay off more workers. But with the additional $104 million in spending cuts, more layoffs are virtually certain. Employees who lose their jobs will account, of course, for many fewer votes than those who would have been furloughed in a government-wide program. Maybe the assembly will escape blame.
Emick, who became one of the budget conferees for a day, while Senate Finance Chairman Hunter Andrews was out sick, said "it's not a pretty picture" viewing the negotiation process from the inside. It's not especially pretty from the outside, either.
by CNB