THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 17, 1995 TAG: 9507150005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
If you are living at home and your parents say you have to buy all new clothes and pay for them yourself, that's an unfunded mandate. They say you have to do something, and you have to pay for it.
Governors scream and holler whenever the federal government burdens their states with another unfunded mandate.
For example, the federal government requires that a state's air be clean - but does not provide all the funds needed to do the cleaning. Thus the federal government has the pleasure of requiring fresh-smelling air; the states have the pain of helping to pay for it.
Governors, despite their howls against unfunded federal mandates, turn around and press unfunded mandates onto counties and cities all the time.
The latest in Virginia is a requirement that cities and counties pay part of the cost of the state's voluntary-buyout program for health-department workers.
The early-retirement-and-voluntary-separation program's severance cost for the fiscal year just ended is $5.6 million, of which localities must fork over $1.6 million.
Thus localities are bearing part of the burden of the governor's program to reduce the number of state employees, a reduction the localities never requested. In Norfolk, where 29 of some 300 state health-department employees have either left or are about to leave, the cost will total $289,835 over two years.
There's a certain logic in having localities bear a bit of the burden in this case, since localities have always paid part of the salaries and retirements of state health-department workers assigned to them. Also, if the employees aren't replaced, Norfolk will save considerable money down the road, though at the cost of reduced health services.
Democratic legislators say localities were not even consulted about the employee reductions and so should not have to help pay for them. Also, the legislators complain that they were kept in the dark about the local costs when they approved the early buyouts earlier this year.
``Isn't this the type of unfunded mandate the governor'' often criticizes? asked Sen. Hunter B. Andrews, D-Hampton, at a heated meeting of his Senate Finance Committee.
There are at least two main problems with unfunded mandates.
1. Eventually the pain works its way down to localities and the costs usually are borne by homeowners - in the form of property taxes.
2. In all the pain-passing, accountability is lost. If the federal government cannot afford a program, don't have the program. If the state cannot afford a program, don't have it.
Give the citizen at the bottom of the tax-money chain a break. by CNB