Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 25, 1993 TAG: 9302250369
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE ASSEMBLY'S DO-LITTLE SESSION
THE 1993 session of a do-little General Assembly slouches toward the weekend to be adjourned. Why did they bother to convene?The commonwealth is beset by inadequate health-care delivery, rising rates of teen pregnancy, school-finance disparities, a creaky and costly local-government system, burgeoning crime, families in poverty, and declining fiscal support for its once-proud system of higher education.
Virginia's lax campaign-finance rules reek of political prostitution and threaten her erstwhile reputation as a good-government state.
To top it off, the challenge of converting defense-related industries to peacetime uses is as urgent in Virginia as in any state of the Union, and more so than in most.
While such problems are never entirely solved (and certainly never solved by government), surely the times demand something more of Virginia's governmental leaders than what Virginia is getting.
Yes, trying to limit handgun purchases to one per month is a worthy effort. Proposing it may even have been, as President Clinton has said, an act of courage on Gov. Wilder's part. A decent bill may even get passed (though the odds of even that have tightened).
But even assuming the best, why should a modest crime-fighting initiative be the centerpiece of the session? The governor's proposal is popular with most Virginians. Support entails "courage" only in the sense that the measure marks a departure from customary political obedience to money-dispensing special interests such as the National Rifle Association.
Not to worry: The session's record on tobacco legislation demonstrates that it's still politics as usual in Richmond. Lawmakers were more concerned with protecting smokers' "rights" than helping to pay for the costs of smoking, or beginning to wean Virginia from a killing industry.
All efforts to raise Virginia's cigarette tax, the nation's lowest at 2.5 cents per pack, were choked off by the tobacco lobby. Forget, too, about any increase in the alcoholic-beverage tax.
Never mind that Medicaid is the state's fastest-rising expense. Never mind that revenues could have been used to fill gaping holes in the delivery of public-health services, including cost-effective preventive medicine, to Virginians. Never mind that decreased consumption of tobacco and alcohol, unlike most taxed products, is a meritorious goal in itself.
Deference to special interests does not end with tobacco legislation. The assembly could have approved meaningful campaign-finance reform, with limits on campaign spending. It didn't, settling instead for minor modifications in finance-reporting rules.
In identifying the handgun-limit cause as his, Wilder distracted attention from what's missing: a willingness - on his part or the legislature's; on Democrats' part or Republicans' - to tackle tough money-costing problems, regardless of urgency or considerations of long-range payback.
Where, for example, is the search for effective drug-treatment and alternative-sentencing programs that might help Virginia escape the seemingly endless - and unquestionably expensive - demand for new prison cells?
Where are the job-training initiatives and other reforms to get people off welfare rather than keep them in poverty? Why defer until next year - at which time, it can be deferred to the next year - an earned-income tax credit that might reduce, for struggling Virginians, the existing incentives to quit working?
Meanwhile, carefully considered proposals to modify the independent-city system (remember the Grayson Commission?), or to give cities and counties uniform taxing authority (remember the Macfarlane Commission?), are shrugged off. If the state won't restructure its local-government dependencies, why should Virginians have confidence that the state is running its own operations efficiently?
Vinton Del. Richard Cranwell deserves a thumbs-up for his late-session effort, its fate unknown at midweek, to put $20 million from recordation-tax revenues into public education in the state's poorer divisions. The amount would help - but is small, given the magnitude of school-funding disparity.
Virginia continues to drift along without a comprehensive strategy for remedying school-finance inequities. Drifting, it seems, is what the General Assembly does best.