Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102240174
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A/1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROB EURE POLITICAL WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
"Everybody who's written me is unhappy," he said. "It's been pretty much an unhappy time."
Sen. Dudley "Buzz" Emick, D-Fincastle, wasn't cheery, either. He said he has never witnessed a legislative session that accomplished less.
"It was a waste of taxpayers' money," Emick said. "I cannot name a single piece of important legislation" passed, other than the budget.
Most participants agreed that the legislature that ended Saturday was commonplace, marked by retrenchment and tentative action. "It was straight-line situation when we came down here," said Sen. Richard Saslaw, D-Springfield. "We were trying to hold on to what we've got."
Issues that perennially spark partisan emotional debate on the House and Senate floors, such as parental notification before a young woman can have an abortion, died in committees. In their place came feel-good, politically oriented measures. Anti-drug measures were popular, as were bills that could grant relief to soldiers in the Persian Gulf.
Lawmakers blamed the paralysis on such things as concerns about the war, the upcoming legislative redistricting, the fall elections and Gov. Douglas Wilder's lack of an agenda. But few denied that the 46-day session was a bust.
Money - specifically, the lack of it - overrode everything else. The first and final task of the 140 legislators was paring $2.2 billion from the state's $26 billion 1990-1992 budget. The state's economic troubles forced legislators to make a number of unpopular cuts.
Money also is the common currency of politics. Without it, legislators found little they could bargain with.
"No money, no horse trading," Del. Jean Cunningham, D-Richmond, said.
"You have to understand the political psyche at work," said Del. Richard Cranwell, D-Vinton. "Everybody had taken an intense amount of pressure from home over the budget before we ever got down here. That fine-tuned everybody politically. You overlay that with the fact that we are facing redistricting later this year. If there is anything more difficult than a major tax increase, it is redistricting. The governor is running for national office, and that heightened the political hype.
"The result of all that is a session that was a commentary on politics and little else. It showed what politics will do to the legislative process. It dismantles it."
House Democrats struggled to control the agenda and steer it from money problems through such issues as gun control, a pro-choice abortion measure and lots of anti-tax, anti-Republican rhetoric. But pressure from special interests and a strain between the state's rural, more conservative Democrats and their more progressive counterparts from urban areas derailed the effort.
The gun-control effort was the prime example. House Democrats initially backed a proposal to let Virginians vote on imposing a three-day waiting period for purchases of handguns. The idea started out with almost enough Democratic backers to pass the bill. The resolve faded quickly under pressure from the National Rifle Association and a general fear among rural legislators that their spending habits with the state budget would be hard enough to explain back home.
Meanwhile, the Senate showed less of a penchant for political fighting, but it did show its age. That chamber was slowed by the absence of two of its most senior Democrats, Stanley Walker of Norfolk and John Buchanan of Wise, who missed nearly all of the session with ailments.
Republicans voted as a bloc on a number of bills in each chamber, but they came away with few real victories.
"The budget is the whole story," said Del. Steve Agee of Salem, the Roanoke Valley's sole Republican legislator. The legislature was driven "by the specter of facing the electorate with this budget and the way the public feels about Doug Wilder."
Much of the final budget compromise adopted Saturday followed the original recommendations of Wilder, who shifted money, seized profits from the state lottery and reduced payments into the state retirement system to make up about half the deficit and cut the rest.
The result was a budget that nobody liked. The budget cut local school aid by more than $100 million, slashed many agency budgets by 15 percent to 20 percent and could cost some 700 state workers their jobs in the next year.
But the alternative to cuts - higher taxes - was anathema to the legislators, all of whom are up for re-election this fall.
"Fear of facing the electorate" caused the legislature to reject higher taxes out of hand, Emick said. He proposed a half-cent increase in the state sales tax for aid to education, but the idea died in committee.
Politicians "wanted to be on both sides of every issue," Emick said. "It's the first time they have had to deal with a true recession."
And the budget writers in the legislature know that when they return next winter to fashion a new budget, many of the accounting tricks they used to stretch this year's plan will not be available, making next year's work all the more difficult.
"We'll be $1.1 billion in the hole before we get started," said Senate Majority Leader Hunter Andrews of Hampton, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and is the legislature's leading budget authority.
"If we had faced up to the problems and accepted some limited revenue-raising measure, that would have helped," said Sen. Joe Gartlan Jr., D-Fairfax County. "The result of not doing that is that we are relying on a paper reserve to get us through the balance" of the budget cycle. "It has created tremendous problems for us."
Cranwell was unapologetic about the budget.
"I know the Republicans say there are a lot of the one-time transfers to make this budget work, and that is correct," Cranwell said. "But I don't subscribe to the theory that we should have gone in and done major surgery on the state budget, cutting programs wholesale. I think we tried to see if we could avoid major cuts in services and hope and expect the economy will turn around by next year.
"If it doesn't, then we'll have no choice but to make those cuts."
by CNB