ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 20, 1995 TAG: 9512200047
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-16 EDITION: METRO
ONE YEAR ago, Gov. George Allen's proposed mid-biennium budget amendments had all the earmarks of a political campaign besotted by tax-cut ideology.
This year, in his proposed budget for the 1996-98 biennium, Allen deserves credit for acting like a sober-minded Virginia governor.
The Allen budget isn't perfect. He again proposes, for example, to zero out state funding for community-action agencies while spending extravagantly on prisons.
Nor has politics made a complete exit from the budget. An accelerated payday to give state workers an extra paycheck in time for Christmas 1996, for instance, strikes us as the sort of accounting gimmick of which politicians are fond, as a way of putting off a fiscal day of reckoning for another administration to contend with.
And the governor's proposals are unlikely to sail unscathed through the General Assembly. The opposition Democrats retain their five-vote majority in the House of Delegates; with a Democratic lieutenant governor as tiebreaker, and barring defections, the state Senate remains nominally in Democratic control.
Still, for all that, and unlike the situation a year ago, the governor this year seems to be reading off the same spreadsheet as the the rest of the commonwealth.
This year, the unveiling of the gubernatorial budget was accompanied not by partisan jabs at Democratic lawmakers but by an invitation for the executive and legislative branches to work together. And beyond the rhetoric, the substance of the budget proposals seems more in accord than his last proposals with fiscal reality and the commonwealth's needs.
His budget priorities, Allen says, are prisons, education and economic development. Some additional spending on prisons is made necessary by continuation of the tougher sentencing policies that voters appeared to endorse when they elected Allen in 1993. Proposed increases in public-school and higher-education funding - a reversal of Allen's position last year - respond to what Virginia voters appeared to have said in last month's balloting when they rejected the governor's pleas for GOP legislative majorities.
Economic development, of course, has long been a watchword for Virginia politicians of all persuasions. The difference this year is that the Allen budget makes some recognition of the link between economic development and support for education.
On the revenue side, the governor did not repeat his call for income-tax cuts and a phase-out in the local-option business, professional and occupational tax, or BPOL. Instead, he's asking for a bipartisan commission to study tax policies and ways of lowering taxes in the future.
In total state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income, Virginia already has one of the lowest tax burdens in the nation. This, plus prospective shifts of heretofore federal responsibilities to the states, suggests that talk of cutting state taxes may be overblown. But a comprehensive and objective re-examination of state tax policies is overdue - and would be valuable if it included such issues as the fairness of taxing food sales.
The budget ball now heads to the legislature's court. With this budget, the governor has shown a capacity to grow in office; will assembly Democrats respond in kind?
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