R. Lee Ware
R-65th District

One of the most important meetings of Session occurred this week as a goodly number of Chesterfield PTAs members gathered at the General Assembly Building to urge us to preserve necessary state funding for county schools.

As noted last week, the budget proposal at present would see direct aid to public education decline by just under 9 percent through fiscal year 2010—a decline begun by the former Governor in FY 2009.  Not surprisingly, given the importance we all assign to public education, state aid to schools—despite the decline—has been reduced only a fraction in comparison to other state governmental categories.

As emphasized by PTA members—including many who have sent me emails—the focus just now is on assuring local schools the “flexibility they need to use their funding to best support their individual student populations.”  That is an objective that could not be better stated, and it is an objective that I wholly support. 

We were able to make a modest advance toward improving the prognosis for Chesterfield Schools’ budget with House passage of my House Bill 196.  This legislation would delay implementation of an Economics Literacy course mandated by the Department of Education, an agency of the Administration (Governor) rather than the legislature.  Passage was just one vote shy of unanimous, a fact highlighting the efforts of PTAs and other parents’ groups state-wide to delay a mandate that threatens not only schools’ budgets but students’ ability to pursue such elective programs as chorus or band.

We must not underestimate the challenges that remain.  With just over a week ‘til Session reaches the half-way point to adjournment in mid-March we have only begun to identify the nearly $2 billion in additional reductions required to balance the budget.  Though a general tax increase is virtually off the table it may be necessary to accept some of the user-fee increases proposed in his outgoing budget by the former Governor.  I, for one, am prepared to believe that modest adjustments in targeted user-fees, as distinct from general taxes, may well be justified.

The larger seriousness of the challenges we face as Virginians was evident in a page-one analysis in the February 2 edition of The New York Times.  The headline read, “Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power.”  The analysis focused on the fact that the projected deficit in the coming year” will total “nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output.”  Worse, “…American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years.”

A separate report this past week was that millions of jobs across a spectrum of types lost during the recession “are never going to come back.”  Included are millions of the manufacturing jobs that have been the bedrock of the vaunted middle-class way-of-life that has been the blessing of Americans and the envy of billions around the world for generations.

And a third report warned that we at present are accruing so much federal debt that we are “mortgaging the future not only of our children but of our grandchildren.”  That we are wallowing in debt even as China has saved and invested to the extent of being able to pay cash for the every business listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Average was the thrust of yet a fourth related report this week.

All of which indicates the national and of course even global context in which our fiscal dilemmas in the 65th District and in Virginia are to be understood—and addressed.  There are no easy ways to balance the state budget when the private sector is shedding jobs, here in Virginia, by the hundreds of thousands.  Without those jobs, and without the businesses that generate them, obviously individuals and families are not in a position to bear increased taxes—and localities are strapped with a budgetary challenge that mirrors the one we are engaging here in Richmond.
The good news is that our area is far better off than many areas of the Commonwealth.  Additional good news is that local officials and our local delegation in Richmond—together with countless civic groups and individuals—are of one mind in working together to meet the challenge positively, cooperatively, together.

Lee Ware represents the 65th District consisting of all of Powhatan County and thirteen precincts in western Chesterfield.  During Session his office number is (804) 698-1065.  Email address is dellware@house.state.va.us