Budget Pain Is Just Beginning For Localities

Across the commonwealth, the story’s the same: Government budget cuts this year will be deep, and there will be no sacred cows among programs and services.

The story’s no different in City Council, boards of supervisors or school board meetings here in Central Virginia. There’s going to be pain ... lots of it.

Former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, who proposed the budget the General Assembly and Gov. Bob McDonnell are now grappling with and revising, filled a nearly $4 billion budget gap with a series of spending cuts and tax surcharges. Over the course of his four years in office, Kaine trimmed spending by close to $10 billion. In a December meeting with editors and reporters at The News & Advance, the governor explained he had cut as deeply as he possibly could and feared longterm damage to core services if he cut any more, hence the tax surcharge, designed to bring in approximately $1 billion in revenue.

As Kaine said last month, if the Republican majority in the House of Delegates didn’t want to approve the tax surcharges, then the responsibility of finding another $1 billion to cut would be theirs.

Well, that monkey is now on the backs of the GOP legislators and Gov. McDonnell after the House Republican leadership effectively killed the surcharge in a series of legislative maneuvers earlier this month.

Now the blood will really start flowing.

Here in Central Virginia, local government leaders are painfully aware of the predicament Richmond is in and how their own bottom lines will be affected.

Let’s just contemplate a few of the likely outcomes ... not “possible,” but “likely”:

* Public safety and law enforcement employees will be laid off.

* Infrastructure work and regular maintenance of public buildings and local streets will be curtailed, reduced or deferred altogether.

* Classroom size will increase as teachers and aides are laid off, and open positions go unfilled.

* School programs targeted at children most at risk of failing in school will be ended or reduced in scope.

* School programs that public education critics have long decried as “superfluous” to education — music, the arts and sports — will be on the chopping block.

* Fees residents pay for services will drastically rise in order just to keep them afloat.

And that’s just the beginning.

Already, school superintendents in Central Virginia, including Paul McKendrick in Lynchburg and Douglas Schuch in Bedford, are warning their boards, staff and parents that deep, painful cuts will be coming.

In Bedford last week, Schuch specifically mentioned the fact that the county operates several small elementary schools. Small neighborhood schools with small class sizes might just be a luxury the taxpayers can’t afford in these tight budget times. Bedford, one of the largest school systems in Central Virginia, faces a budget shortfall of close to $6 million. How the School Board chooses to balance its books is anyone’s guess; school consolidation, staff cuts and benefit reductions are all on the table.

Earlier, in Lynchburg, parents and teachers turned out at a school budget forum to voice support for various programs in the city schools system.

An extensive renovation of Heritage High School still must be carried out, parents and teachers said. Programs such as Play It Smart still must be funded out of local dollars, former students argued. Class size must still be kept low, parents and teachers demanded.

And when the focus moves to localities’ general budgets, the demands will be much the same.

Police and emergency services must not be touched, law enforcement supporters will argue. Chop the garbage collectors or the utilities workers before you lay off a cop, the argument will go. Except still get every neighborhood street cleared of snow before the last flake falls.

Libraries, parks and recreation, public transit, social services program — they’re all on the table this budget year. There will be supporters of each and every program, demanding their sacred cow be spared from the budget cutter’s knife; cut that program over there, not mine, they’ll argue.

And no one ... absolutely no one ... will accept the fact that citizens who expect services from government have a civic responsibility to fund government properly in order to deliver those services: police, fire protection, schools, transportation, social services.

We doubt that even the fiscal blood that will surely flow this spring will convince them of that fact. To coin a phrase, “There’s no free lunch, people.”