Last week, I voted against the House version of the state budget, which the Republican majority wrote for the first time in many years with absolutely no input from Democratic legislators. The fact that they shut out of the process us Democrats — including the Democrats who sit on the budget-writing Appropriations Committee — is not in itself the reason I opposed the budget. But a budget that incorporated ideas and input from both sides of the aisle might have avoided some of the fatal flaws in the two-year, $75 billion spending plan that every House Republican voted for and every House Democrat voted against on Feb. 25.
In the face of the worst revenue crisis since the Great Depression, cuts in state money to education are inevitable, especially considering how successfully we have protected public education while we cut $7 billion over the past four years. However, rather than making temporary cuts that can be restored when the economy improves, House Republicans seized the opportunity to institute long-term policy changes that will undermine public schools for years to come. For example, in the guise of “flexibility” for school districts, they are lowering quality by allowing larger class sizes — even though we know that small classes produce better outcomes. Rather than merely reduce funds for preschool, early reading intervention, and services for at-risk children, they have lumped these services into a lottery-funded block grant and then changed the distribution formula to literally take money away from poor students and give it to students who aren’t poor. (Our community, which has a high proportion of low-income students, loses millions of dollars under this scheme.) Rather than build the education budget on solid accounting, they built the education budget on a foundation of sand, giving local governments the authority to increase what teachers pay toward their retirement benefits, assuming every local government will extract the maximum amount possible from those teachers, and then folding that fantasy figure into the state budget calculus. Any education cuts should be temporary, they should not compromise quality in the classroom (and certainly not permanently), they should not be on the backs of poor and at-risk students, and they should be based on real numbers.
House Republicans have railed against the federal government all session, passing bills to assert “states’ rights” over everything from health care to commerce to the manufacture of firearms. Imagine our surprise when they included in the House budget language to spend Medicaid funds that Congress has not yet even approved. However, in another fiscally obtuse move that might have been prevented with Democratic input, they specifically redirect any new federal Medicaid enhancement money (which they hope and assume Congress will pass) from health care for the neediest Virginians to non-health care programs, foregoing the corresponding federal matching funds. Therefore, rather than cutting just $370 million from Medicaid, they are choosing to leave on the table $730 million of federal matching funds, producing an overall cut of $1.1 billion.
Another area of deep concern is the high-risk plan to postpone state contributions to the Virginia Retirement System. The Pew Center on the States recently released a comprehensive report on state pension liabilities, and it noted that Virginia is already paying slightly less into our pension trust fund than is actuarially prudent to ensure we can meet all of our future obligations. According to the director of the Virginia Retirement System, if all goes well and the economy improves — and if we don’t make a habit of skipping these payments — Virginia’s pension trust fund should eventually grow enough so we can still meet our future obligations. But what if the economy slips again or if growth does not meet expectations? Failing to fully fund our pension trust fund could find us shortchanging teachers, fire fighters, law enforcement officers, and state and local employees of the benefits they have earned. While temporarily postponing state contributions to the Virginia Retirement System may be a fast and easy (and, I fear, addictive) way to come up with $800 million to help balance the budget, it is too great a risk to our future financial stability.
Massive cuts to public education and health care and raiding the state pension trust fund will result in tens of thousands of lost jobs, hinder our economic recovery, threaten our triple-A bond rating, and diminish our coveted rankings by independent groups as best state for business, best state to raise a child, and best managed state. These are a mere taste of the reasons I voted against the House budget last week, but I remain hopeful that House and Senate negotiators will eventually produce a budget we can all support. In the meantime, sign up for my email list at www.davidenglin.org to stay apprised. As always, I welcome your ideas and your feedback at 703-549-3203 or DelDEnglin@house.virginia.gov. Thank you for the opportunity to serve.
