Does State Government Hate Localities?

How do I despise you? Let me count the ways.
Do state political leaders in Richmond have it in for municipal governments in Virginia? Sometimes, you have to wonder.
A variety of actions over the past several years could justify your believing that both Democratic and Republican state politicians really, truly don’t like local government. Just consider the following:
* State government sets the opening day for schools across the commonwealth. This one dates back to the 1980s when then-Del. Al Smith, one of the Democrats’ top fundraisers, introduced legislation to set the opening day as the Tuesday after Labor Day, forbidding any division to open before that date. The legislation was jokingly known as the “Kings Dominion Relief Act” because it ensured a steady supply of teenage employees for the amusement park with the added benefit of a holiday before the start of school. Kings Dominion’s parent company, by the way, was a contributor to Smith’s party coffers. Despite attempts to repeal this meddling law, it remains in effect to this day.
* State politicians are repeatedly trying to score points with voters at the expense of localities. Remember former Gov. Jim Gilmore’s infamous car-tax cut? The idea sure sounded great: Promise to kill off a maligned local tax if elected, claim the rejuvenated economy would more than make up for the lost revenue and promise the state would help out if it didn’t. Just ask leaders in localities across the state how that one played out: a source of tax revenue lost and Richmond balking at filling the gap as promised.
But promising a tax break you can hardly deliver on isn’t just limited to Republicans. Local governments dodged a bullet during this session of the General Assembly when the Senate killed Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s proposal for a constitutional amendment that would allow localities to exempt up to 20 percent of a home’s value from taxes. That could have been a fiscal nightmare for local governments and the state’s business community, who likely would have footed the added bill.
* Unfunded state mandates in public schools have been a tradition in Virginia for decades. Family Life Education, the bête noir of social conservatives in the early 1990s, was just one of many hated classroom mandates that came down from Richmond with no implementation money. Add to that SOLs, SOQs and a host of other educational alphabet soup programs, and you begin to wonder how teachers even find time actually to teach.
* State government leaders routinely see local governments as their lackeys when it comes to implementing policies Richmond doesn’t have the gumption to do itself. The transportation funding plan the General Assembly cobbled together in 2007 is the perfect example. The majority of the Republican-controlled House of Delegates was too chicken to raise the statewide gas tax to pay for needed construction and maintenance, so they created unelected transportation “authorities” in Tidewater and Northern Virginia to levy a special tax in those areas as part of a broader package of piecemeal funding approaches. When the state Supreme Court declared the approach unconstitutional this year, what was Richmond’s bright idea? Consider telling local governments in those areas they could levy and collect the tax, keeping the fingerprints of the anti-tax crowd in Richmond off the fiasco.
The litany of Richmond’s transgressions could go on ad infinitum, and nothing in the future is likely to change. Is it too much to dream, though, that Richmond could begin to think of local governments not as servants and lackeys, but as true partners?
In this day and age, sadly, it seems it is.