Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 7, 1993 TAG: 9301070431
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
MORE OF THE SAME?
THE GENERAL Assembly will reconvene Wednesday in Richmond for a "short" session that's sure to be overshadowed by the much larger show commencing in Washington a week later, and by political maneuvers aimed at the November election. This is the year in which Virginians will be choosing a new governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and all 100 members of the House of Delegates.Legislators must dispose quickly of 390 bills carried over from the 1992 session, and will have only a few weeks to do justice to the mass of new bills that will be introduced. With Gov. Wilder at loggerheads with the leaders of his own party, and Republicans thirsting to drink from the silver cup after a long drought, this is hardly the year in which the legislature breaks significant new ground.
Virginia clings to the anachronism of a two-year budget cycle, but there's always a lot of sound and fury at these odd-year sessions in proposing amendments (seldom adopted) for the second year of the biennium. With the state's economy looking a little better than when the 1992-94 budget was put together last year, Wilder is proposing no cuts and $116.5 million in new spending for "operations" and $105 million in bonds for new prisons.
Legislators and citizens alike are sure to have lots of ideas about things deserving more money - starting with more generous raises for state employees and schoolteachers. But this late in the state's four-year election cycle, it's just hard to see much support for the new taxes that would be required to fund them.
With the $613 million in general-obligation bonds approved by voters in November, the governor's proposed budget amendments would bring total state spending for 1992-94 to just under $30 billion, or roughly $5,000 per citizen. That's considerably more than twice what was spent 10 years earlier.
The fiscal problems facing the state are structural in nature. After holding steady for a number of years, public-school enrollment is rising again. State colleges are loudly proclaiming the need for some 50,000 new places in the next five or six years. The state prison system now houses 17,000 inmates. Officials say this will increase to 22,000 in the next four years, and predict more than 30,000 prisoners by the year 2000. Local jails also are packed with inmates awaiting places in the state system.
But the fastest-growing item in Virginia's budget is Medicaid. That's the federal-state partnership that funds medical care for the indigent. Costs are not only driven relentlessly higher by the special dispensation that applies to everything touching health in this country, but also by new congressional mandates. In fact, more than half the new money Wilder has found for 1993-94 is earmarked for Medicaid.
The greatest political problem facing legislators is funding wages and benefits for 130,600 state employees, college faculty and those working in local constitutional offices, such as clerks of court and commissioners of revenue. They received a 3 percent raise in 1990, none in 1991 and 2 percent in 1992. Wilder has proposed giving them another 2 percent effective Dec. 1, but has made no specific provision for state participation in a round of pay raises for schoolteachers in 1993.
The governor has requested a $30 million "rainy day" fund, however, and lawmakers are sure to focus on this and any other "found" money to be able to go home bragging that they did what they could for teachers.
Since public-school teachers now and always have been employees of the counties, cities and towns in which they work and not the state of Virginia, it might have been better had the legislature never got itself into the business of trying to be the arbiter of their wages. But the idea that it should function as a super school board is now so firmly established that there will be no going back.
The problem is that conditions vary so tremendously among Virginia's 138 school divisions as to make it almost impossible to arrive at sensible, uniform policies that treat all parties fairly.
State and local employees eager for larger pay raises in this still-lagging economy might reflect on the fact that few of their number have lost jobs, and their ranks have actually increased. They might also reflect on certain advantages they enjoy when it comes to health insurance and retirement not widely shared by their private-sector counterparts.
In sum, the bulk of state spending is driven by formulas and fixed costs. Legislators could change the rules, but would do so only as a last resort. The problem with any tax increase is that the cream will be skimmed off to cut a better deal for those working for government, with little assurance that greater taxpayer exertions will translate to improved services.
The Wilder approach of muddling through - keeping bureaucrats on short rations - was probably the best he could do. But it's just hard to see another four years passing without an increase in the sales tax to 5 percent and an increase in the income-tax rate from 5.75 percent to something like 6.5 percent. That wouldn't break us, but neither would it satisfy.
What's needed are new philosophies for delivering basic state services, but we hear very little of that. And when we do, it's quickly shot down.
Whoever wins the governorship in 1993 should be prepared to launch a comprehensive review of all operations of state government. Unless structural changes are undertaken in the first year of the new administration, be prepared for more of what we've seen in the past - a great increase in spending accompanied by a steady clamor that it was by no means sufficient.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.