State Shows Its Disdain for Municipalities

The News & Advance
Published: April 15, 2008

When the General Assembly slashed $100 million in aid to local governments from the new state budget, lawmakers didn’t bother to consider that some of that money was to pay for state mandates. Those are services the state has required local governments to provide — services relating to law enforcement, human services and education, among others.
Reductions in state aid to pay for those services is putting the city — and other cities in Virginia — in a bind. So, as City Council prepares to put the finishing touches on Lynchburg’s budget for the coming year, it discovers that the city is likely to lose up to $1.6 million in state aid over the next two years.
It’s outrageous. The state cuts put the city in the position of either having to cut some services of its own to pay for the state-mandated services or having to raise local taxes to pay for the state services.
And that, perhaps, is exactly what the majority Republicans in the House of Delegates had in mind. Rather than raise taxes at the state level to pay for the mandated services, they force the city to decide whether to raise local taxes to pay for state-required services or to cut other purely local services.
If the city makes the responsible move to pay for state services and maintain its other local programs, it raises taxes. So City Council takes the blame for raising taxes rather than the state lawmakers who are really to blame. But this way, you see, state representatives escape the blame of raising any taxes.
During a recent budget session, City Manager Kimball Payne got it exactly right when he suggested the council send the state an oversized check that said, “Here, we’re paying for state services because you can’t figure out how to do it.”
State dollars make up about 10 percent of Lynchburg’s $155 million general fund.
The city has created a $2 million contingency fund in the proposed new budget in an attempt to cover the state cuts. But that will take money away from reserves that normally would go toward capital improvements, such as building renovations and infrastructure needs.
Payne told the council that needs in those areas are “incredible” and that he is committed to “using every dollar I can find” for such improvements.
At the same time, the city manager said he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of making cuts to some service areas. He has asked city departments to rethink where they can cut and what the impact of the cuts would be.
“In some cases, cuts may be absorbed,” he said, “and in other cases, they may be dealt with in other ways. In terms of (whether we’ll cut) services, we don’t know yet.”
Several communities, including Lynchburg, have sent letters protesting the budget situation to the governor. Those letters reflect the frustration local governments across the state are feeling as they try to come up with the money to provide the services their residents have come to expect.
The letter signed by Mayor Joan Foster complained that the city is in a difficult position and suggested the state budget was “simply not good fiscal stewardship. The $100 million of across-the-board cuts are particularly onerous and provide local governments less ‘flexibility’ than the General Assembly assumes.”
If the General Assembly continues to reduce aid to local governments, it must also help with the difficult task of deciding which programs to cut and where to cut them. That means the lawmakers will have to decide which mandates to remove from the local budget burden.
For now, it is simply too easy for them to balance the state budget on the backs of local governments without having to accept any blame for the cuts in services that result.