CVTC will be among topics in upcoming General Assembly session

The big picture will be the economy when the General Assembly convenes in Richmond in January, three Lynchburg-area legislators told the Lynchburg Regional Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday.

Any group seeking state funds for its programs should expect the answer to be “no” because legislators and Gov. Timothy M. Kaine will cut at least $3 billion out of a $77 billion budget for 2010, they said.

Central Virginia Training Center may be the top local issue to confront the assembly this year, said state Sen. Steve Newman, R-Lynchburg.

“CVTC is very much at risk this year, in my opinion,” Newman said.

An alliance of mental health advocates has called for state funds that were intended for upgrading the center’s safety standards to be used instead for moving the residents into group homes.

“We are responsible to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves,” Newman said. “Many of those people need to be, and their families desperately want them to be, in that secure location.

“There is going to be a push away from that this year, and we as a community and as a commonwealth need to push back,” he said.

Newman and Dels. Kathy Byron, R-Campbell County, and Shannon Valentine, D-Lynchburg, agreed that economic conditions are tough.

“This year is going to be difficult,” Newman, R-Lynchburg, told about 75 people at the chamber’s legislative breakfast.

“On an order of magnitude, I think it goes back to the Wilder years,” Newman said, referring to the early 1990s when he was a freshman legislator in Richmond and newly elected Gov. Douglas Wilder was faced with a budget shortfall that resulted in heavy cuts, notably to higher education.

“But we made it through that, and we will make it through this one,” Newman said. He said he expects the budget shortfall for 2010 to be $3.5 billion. Every major source of state revenue is coming up short, he said.

Byron reminded the chamber members that Virginia has won awards for spending reforms and other changes it has made in state government.

“But we are going to have to actually do surgery on the budget this year,” she said, “and that’s going to hurt a little bit. But in the long run we are going to recover

strongly.”

Byron said Del. Lacey Putney, I-Bedford and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has told her that Kaine does not plan to raise taxes in the revised budget he will submit to legislators next week.

Valentine said he has been asked to propose legislation to prevent further development along U.S. 29 while the state conducts a study of whether the highway should be a transportation artery or a local-economy asset.

“I don’t know exactly how we can do this as the study is moving forward,” Valentine said, “but we must find a way to protect the asset we have today.”

She told the chamber members that Charlottesville had 14 traffic lights in the U.S. 29 area many years ago when work on a bypass was begun. Now it has 53, she said.

Newman, too, put U.S. 29 on his priority list.

“This is not an unwinnable battle,” Newman said. “This is something that is critical to us.”

In recent years, two public-opinion polls showed residents of Charlottesville “want to have proper ingress and egress,” Newman said.

“It’s just some of their leadership who are committed to everything being just like it is, every cow pasture must be exactly as it is,” Newman said.

Newman also said Virginia’s budget difficulties would be worse if the state had not “made many right decisions over the years.”

“One of them was producing the ‘rainy day fund,’” he said, and “if it was not for the rainy day fund we would have immense difficulty.”

However, Kaine has manipulated revenue forecasts to justify using money from the rainy day fund, Newman said. “We allowed the governor last year to get into the rainy day fund and he drained some money off.”

Legislators should plan budgets based on their own set of revenue forecasts, Newman said.