By Del. R. Lee Ware
R-65th District

As you read these lines, the House and Senate will have announced budget proposals for 2010-2012. The House budget, which likely will become the bill by which the biennial budget will be adopted, is expected to differ considerably from the budget proposal announced late last week by Governor McDonnell. The bottom line will remain the same, however, spending will be reduced by roughly $2 billion from the current budget.

Concerns about the cuts proposed by Gov. McDonnell have come to me from all quarters, understandably and also helpfully. Only Medicaid, among the dozen major areas of spending, is expected to rise for 2010-2012.

Understandably, too, the major concern of 65th District residents pertains to public education (K-12). Schools in both Chesterfield and Powhatan are facing multi-million dollar reductions from sundry sources of funding, federal, state, and, owing to reduced assessments of both homes and commercial properties, local government.

Though the House figures were not available as I wrote these lines, I can emphasize that the House budget will not propose cuts as severe, in some instances, as those proposed in the outgoing budget by former Governor Kaine. As noted two weeks ago, even former Gov. Kaine proposed that K-12 spending for FY 2009 - FY 2012 be reduced by 8.9%. This figure compares to reductions in other areas of state government averaging about 20% and, in one instance (Technology), 49%.

This is little comfort to those of us who are parents, teachers or others engaged in or devoted to our schools. My own children have finished school, but I have three grandchildren in public school and a fourth will soon join them.

What is comforting is reviewing the figure within the larger context in which the House is working toward a balanced budget as required by the Constitution of Virginia. That is no insignificant note, by the way: the Constitution requires the legislature to adopt a balanced budget. (Would that Congress were bound by a similar constraint.)

Two weeks ago I noted that the context within which we are struggling includes federal deficits now totaling trillions of dollars for the foreseeable future–eventually to be paid through new federal taxes–for every individual, family, and business. Since the recession began, upwards of 100,000 $80,000-per-year jobs have disappeared from northern Virginia alone. Unemployment in swaths of the Southside and Southwest is as high as 20%.

This week we were advised that–though the Virginia Retirement System (VRS) is in fairly good shape–the states nationally face a $1 trillion shortfall in public pension plans, an amount representing $8,000 for every American household. (Virginia ranked among the 16 states with “solid” performance; 15 states “need improvement,” and 19 states face “serious concerns” with their pension plans.)

The Composite Index for School Funding, compiled every two years, takes into account a locality’s ability to pay for its schools and is a mechanism that has been part of the state’s school funding formula for decades. The intent, which derived from a lawsuit about equitable support for schools ranging from wealthy to poor areas of the Commonwealth, is to provide fair distribution of state school funds. Gov. Kaine abruptly and without consultation “froze” the composite, a move of dubious legality. Gov. McDonnell has simply responded, rightly, to the need to restore the index to the state school-funding formula. As a result, some school divisions will receive more state aid, others, including Chesterfield and Powhatan, will receive less. This is in keeping with Virginia’s status as a ‘Commonwealth.’

Our county governments face the same constraints as the state government.

So, what to do other than to tighten the belt? The broad consensus in the House, among a majority of both parties, is to balance the budget without a general tax increase. Economists of all stripes advise against adding new taxes to the burdens being borne by all of us. And some of us, for example, customers of some utilities, are facing monthly bills that have doubled and even tripled in recent months–the subject of the most heated debate in the House in recent days.

The proposed reductions in K-12 have an important context, too: The proposed FY 2010 budget for K-12 would be reduced by 3.5% or $249.2 million. (By comparison, Higher Education would be cut by 30%.)

Also, over the last 10 years, the General Assembly has increased direct aid to public education by almost 60% (58.9%, to be precise). By comparison, student enrollment during the past decade increased by 7.2%. Obviously, then, even when allowing for the modest inflation during the decade, the legislature has greatly increased spending vis-a-vis student enrollments.

The context can be elaborated:

1) For FY 2011, K-12 spending of $5.7 billion will be 53.4% higher than in FY 2000–while student enrollment will have risen by only 8.1%.

2) For FY 2012, K-12 spending of $5.8 billion is 55.4 percent than in FY 2000–while student enrollment will have increased by only 9%.

Of course all of this is little comfort to those of us facing larger classes, fewer electives, or even the prospect of the elimination of our jobs. The solace is simply that we are in a recession of world-historic proportions, our federal debt is now astronomical, and neither the state nor most counties’ governments can increase taxes–at least not prudentially–at the moment.

The one thing we have avoided in Richmond is any finger-pointing. All of us understand that we are in a predicament of origins beyond our control and, to a large degree, requiring prescriptions beyond our control indeed, prescriptions dependent, on the one hand, on the federal government getting its house in order, and, on the other hand, the private sector regaining its balance sufficiently to begin to generate the jobs from which tax revenues derive.

I can assure readers, too, that every delegate from our area is working diligently, and also cooperatively, to ease the pain, to do our utmost to protect our core services–public education foremost among them–and to keep our own Virginian ship of state on a prudent course for the future.