State’s Budget Crisis Will Take a Heavy Toll

In just over five weeks, the 140 members of the General Assembly will converge on Richmond for what’s supposed to be a 45-day “short” session.

The 40 state senators and 100 delegates would probably want to be anywhere on Earth but at the state Capitol as the commonwealth confronts a budget crisis of historic proportions. In meetings with the leaders of the Assembly’s money panels, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine warned legislators the state could face a revenue shortfall of up to $3.2 billion. The state constitution requires the governor to have a balanced budget, and the governor warned there would be no areas of spending off-limits to his budget-cutters.

That includes law enforcement. Public education. Transportation. Health and social services. Virginia’s public colleges and universities.

The fact that Gov. Kaine has explicitly placed such previously sacrosanct areas of the budget on the chopping block indicates the severity of the problem facing the commonwealth.

Unless there’s an economic miracle between now and the time the Assembly convenes, the cuts are going to be deep and painful. They’ll be felt most excruciatingly at the level of local government.

Public schools, in all likelihood, will take a hit, and it will be a hit that will translate into higher student/teacher ratios, larger class sizes, possible layoffs of instructional personnel and even elimination of cherished instructional programs.

Health and social services, the programs that directly affect the lives of the most economically vulnerable Virginians, aren’t going to be protected, either. Programs that aid the working poor with food assistance and health care will see their monies cut dramatically or eliminated. Families that are barely able to make it from one paycheck to the next will be even more stressed by the looming cuts.

Virginia’s higher education system will also come under the bean-counters’ axes. At just the time that a large pool of Virginians will be reaching college-age, the state’s public institutions will either be limiting enrollment because of funding cuts or implementing higher tuition and fees for in-state students. On Wednesday, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education released its biannual report detailing college costs across the country. From 1982 until 2007, the cost of a college education rose 439 percent, the center found, while the average family’s income only climbed 147 percent during that same 25-year period. Middle-class students have taken on more debt to pay for a needed college education; poor students have found themselves clamoring for a smaller and smaller pot of grants and scholarships.

Law enforcement and emergency services, along with education, are among the state’s top priorities for citizens. The ranks of the Virginia State Police could be stretched even thinner, with classes of new cadets at the state police academy and empty positions going unfilled. Localities could see less money from Richmond to pay for sheriffs’ deputies or supplemental funds to pay for police in the state’s cities.

Local governments will be on the front lines, bearing the brunt of the state’s cuts. Just this past summer, local governments across the commonwealth were forced to surrender $50 million to cover the state’s shortfall. Lynchburg, for example, had to pay the state almost $500,000, rather than risk even deeper cuts to law enforcement, children’s services and other programs.

The Assembly is infamous for burdening local governments with a myriad of unfunded mandates; public education is fraught with them. If state government were truly interested in working with local governments to weather the recession, legislators would suspend many of the strictures placed on localities and allow leaders the local level to determine how best to spread the budgetary pain.

Don’t count on it, though.