Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 24, 1993 TAG: 9304240347
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Medium
Instead, they ended up with a written commitment from a state Senate and House of Delegates conference committee to look seriously at the disparities issue next year.
Trumbo told members of the Pulaski County Chamber of Commerce at a luncheon that it took a coalition of rural legislators and others to get that much.
He and Del. Tommy Jackson, R-Radford, said such coalitions will be necessary because of the shift in legislative representation from rural to urban areas.
"There's more of them than there is of us," Trumbo said.
The $20 million, he said, would have come from taxes collected by the state on real estate sales. It came in a House amendment to a bill giving Northern Virginia money from the same source to finance a highway borrow-and-build program.
It is not close to the minimum of $500 million needed to even touch the disparities problem, he said, "but at least it was a little bit."
In the Senate, Trumbo said, the amendment deadlocked 19-19 and Lt. Gov. Donald Beyer cast the tie-breaking vote to kill it. However, its supporters found enough help from other legislators to get it reconsidered.
Again the vote was 19-19 with some switches on both sides, Trumbo said, but this time Beyer voted for it.
But a staff person of Senate Majority Leader Hunter Andrews, D-Hampton, noted that a bond bill that creates debt - as the Northern Virginia road-building part did - would require a constitutional majority of 21 in favor instead of 20, so Beyer ruled the amendment killed.
Because the House and Senate versions then differed, a conference committee was necessary. Trumbo said that Andrews, as Senate Finance Committee chairman, appointed himself and two other opponents of the amendment.
Trumbo objected because representation of the minority view is required on such committees, and he said Beyer ruled in his favor. When Andrews did not change the appointments, Trumbo and others generated enough support to dissolve the Senate into a committee of the whole.
The entire Senate would have, in effect, been on the conference committee. Such measures had not been taken since the desegregation controversy in 1959, Trumbo said.
"A lot of people from Northern Virginia didn't agree with our position" on the amendment, Trumbo said, but a lot of them were going to vote with the rural legislators "because it was the right thing to do. . . . One person should not hold up the entire Senate and the General Assembly."
At the last minute, he said, Andrews did reappoint, but the amendment still was killed in the committee. The committee members, including Andrews, are now on the record as committing to taking substantive action next year, he said.
"It seems to me that, in fact, what we have here is what we as rural legislators are going to have to do. . . . If it means taking on the majority leader of the Senate, so be it," Trumbo said of the coalition-building.
Baker said the pending suit by a coalition of poorer school districts is winnable and also has the effect of leveraging legislators from other parts of the state into acting.
He said easing disparities would require the richer school districts to raise their real estate taxes, and they would not do that willingly. But the suit gives them a message: "Buddy, if we win this thing, you're going to be in a lot worse shape," he said.
He and Trumbo said it is often more important to kill bills than to pass them, but Baker said, "there aren't enough of us that think that way."
They had opposed funding a state lottery headquarters building, which Baker called "the darling of the Lottery Department since 1989. . . . This is at the same time that we can't find any money to spend on school children, we can't do anything about disparities."
Baker said the legislature did find time to name a shell called Chesapecten jeffersonius as the state fossil.
"It also doubles as the state ashtray," he joked.
by CNB