ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 22, 1996 TAG: 9602220015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Ray L. Garland
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
POLITICS in all times and places has a quality of the absurd. But seldom more than now in Virginia. Just the other day, Lt. Gov. Don Beyer told cheering Democrats expecting him to lead their party back to the governor's mansion, "Flash: Virginia schools will be the best in the nation. It's our destiny."
Here's a flash for Beyer: You can't have the best schools unless you have the best students to start with, and we are light years from that state of grace. Unlike Iowa, North Dakota and a host of other states where students demonstrate higher levels of competence despite smaller school budgets, Virginia is simply more diverse. Go to those Virginia localities that mirror social conditions in Iowa and North Dakota and you'll find the same thing you find there: schools obtaining outstanding results without spending a lot.
The ritual of budget-making at the General Assembly is always a case of less than meets the eye. The governor presents a budget that legislators quickly denounce as inadequate. When given the chance, they propose hundreds of millions in amendments - most of which stand no chance. After extensive hearings and palavers, they end by tinkering at the margin and pronounce it a great improvement over the original.
This year, it mainly came down to cash and stock the state hopes to realize from the conversion of Blue Cross of Virginia (Trigon) to a for-profit corporation.
Gov. George Allen wanted to spend $95 million out of $159 million Trigon would pay the state and dedicate $64 million to a foundation that would fund health-related research at Virginia institutions of higher learning. Legislators got Trigon to increase the payment to $175 million and appropriated most of it in the 1996-98 budget. As a large policyholder, the state will also come in for a block of the new Trigon stock, which will be worth $25 million. That will be earmarked for the foundation.
It is silly to drop a one-time windfall into operating budgets, where its presence will scarcely be noticed. It simply builds a larger base that will have to be sustained from general revenues in the next budget. The Trigon money and stock should have been placed in trust with the Virginia Health Foundation to provide a permanent stream of revenue for private initiatives, such as local free clinics, to reach close to 1 million Virginians who can't afford health insurance but don't qualify for Medicare or Medicaid.
The problem was that the medically uninsured constitute no organized bloc to which politicians can relate. Regardless of their number, there is simply no incentive to stand up for them.
Nor was there any good politics in standing up for localities getting even a tiny slice of lottery profits to spend as they see fit. Allen, who made a big issue last year of giving localities all of the some $300 million a year the state takes from public gaming, earmarked a measly $15 million of that for localities in the 1996-98 budget. But Democrats wanted even that dollop, to be able to claim they "found" more money for education. In the end, their findings amounted to not much more than Allen wanted, and most of that came from Trigon.
For all their claims of devotion to education, Democrats showed little sympathy for reform or accountability. Even a much-watered-down version of Allen's idea of granting a few public schools a "charter" to operate in a possibly more independent and innovative fashion was defeated. My goodness, even President and Mrs. Clinton tout charter schools as a possible way out of the public-school morass.
It seemed for a time that Democrats would nix entirely Allen's proposal to spend $23 million to develop tests at five grade levels to see how well Virginia students are meeting the state's new learning standards.
The Senate agreed to the testing program, but wanted it scaled back to four grade levels, shaving $7 million from Allen's proposal. But the House wants only three grades tested, and added insult to injury by insisting the governor apply for $6.7 million in federal Goals 2000 money to do even that.
In his first year, Allen made a great flourish of refusing to become involved with Clinton's Goals 2000, seeing it as the opening wedge of a Democratic strategy to make the federal government the tail that wags the dog in public education without putting up much money.
These and other differences between the House and Senate versions of the $34.6 billion budget will now have to be settled in a conference committee. Allen also will get another crack by wielding his veto pen, but his political capital is diminishing
For all the Democrats' blather about being the party of education, they came up with very little additional funding - about $110 million more for state colleges than Allen wanted. While that sounds a lot, it should be seen in the context of spending by state colleges that will exceed $6 billion in 1996-98. And what they gave with one hand they took back with the other. The House version of the budget actually freezes tuition charges for two years. If this stands, which is unlikely, state colleges would probably lose more money than Democrats found for them. On the cost-containment side, Democrats frustrated Allen's efforts to exercise greater control over college staffing.
The governor and Republicans are paying a high price for a 1995 campaign that failed to answer Democratic charges that education in Virginia was on a starvation diet. It would have been a simple matter to tell voters that spending on higher education had increased by 100 percent the past 10 years while enrollment grew by less than 20 percent. Also, that average, per-pupil expenditures in excess of $7,000 a year were higher than ever under Allen.
Beyer has made it plain he intends to ride the school bus to victory next year. Unless the GOP wants to get into a bidding war to see which party can spend the most on education, it must at least try to expose people to the facts.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times columnist.
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