Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, December 27, 1994                   TAG: 9412280041
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BUDGET CUTS

Sometimes we should be so lucky.

It would have been pleasant had Gov. Allen forgotten about Western Virginia in designing a budget that slashes by half the state funding for museums and cultural organizations. Fully a third of the 30 institutions on his hit list are in this part of the state, seven of them in the Roanoke Valley.

Those seven - including Explore Park, the Virginia Museum of Transportation and the cornucopia of cultural organizations at Center in the Square - stand to lose more than $600,000 in the coming year if the General Assembly goes along with the governor's proposed budget cuts.

The Allen administration says it's time such groups looked to private funding sources. Fair enough. But most are already tapping private sources to the nth. In Roanoke's case, where so many largely rely on the same pool of private contributions, it's hard to imagine that some won't come up dry in efforts to make up what the state is taking away.

And the museum cuts aren't even a half of what this region may lose. As local political, business and cultural leaders - at least those daring to protest in public - complained last week, Virginia Tech and Radford University will be hit particularly hard by Allen's budget cuts for higher education.

And a major Roanoke Valley economic-development project, the renovated Hotel Roanoke and new conference center, would be seriously set back by Allen's proposed elimination of seed money for a Tech training and conference program.

The governor says his budget plans merely follow the voters' mandate. Fair enough. Voters pretty clearly want less government. But it's not clear that voters around here want less state aid for education, culture, recreation, etc., in Southwest Virginia.

That's something for the voters to work out - but also for the governor. As we recall it, candidate Allen promised more, not less, support from Richmond to help this region keep up with the rest of the state. And he pledged to put state government on the side of economic development.

It is by now obvious that Southwest Virginia gets least neglected during political campaigns and budget-axing time. People in these parts better get used to such treatment. The government money pot is shrinking at all levels, and political influence in this part of the state is unlikely to get any stronger, absent significant growth.

We can complain all we want about Richmond's unfairness. We can also demand, as noted above, that the state do what it can to encourage successful cooperative efforts and efficiencies among regions, while not adding more to their burdens. But it's a fact of life that, for our region to progress, we'll have to rely increasingly on our own resources and initiative.