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General Assembly money committees delivered on Gov. Ralph Northam’s pledge to raise teachers’ salaries by passing competing budget proposals on Wednesday that would raise salaries by 3% to 5% in the fiscal year which begins July 1.
The House Appropriations and Senate Finance and Appropriations Committees also proposed giving state employees and other state-supported workers the 3% raise they lost last year. because of the public health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic – and a little more in the spending of the House plan which aims to raise wages by 3.5%.
Proposed budgets differ on what to do with the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority property on Hermitage Road in Richmond. Virginia Commonwealth University wants to buy it for a sports village that would include a new baseball stadium for its program and the Richmond Flying Squirrels minor league Double-A franchise.
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The Chamber is offering to give VCU $16 million to buy the ABC property, in hopes the state will recoup the money through higher profits from the Virginia Liquor Monopoly. The Senate proposes to maintain the university’s right of first refusal to purchase the property at fair market value.
The House budget also includes $12 million to purchase the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing building in Prince George’s County, and nearly $7 million to establish the Commonwealth Center for Cloud Computing in Henrico County through a higher education partnership that VCU would manage.
The final budget will be determined in the coming weeks in a special legislative session which is now due to end on March 1. The House of Delegates and Senate are expected to vote on their budgets on Friday, then form a conference committee to negotiate differences in spending plans.
These negotiations will also be shaped by a new revenue forecast expected from Northam next week. It is likely to give the Assembly more money to spend in the $141 billion budget, including more than $47 billion in the general fund which uses state taxes to pay for basic government services. .
The House enters the negotiations with a revenue advantage, as it offers more than $60 million less tax relief than the Senate for companies that received tax-exempt loans from the federal government last year. latest to protect jobs during government restrictions imposed on many businesses to slow the spread of COVID-19.
This is the third budget that the Assembly has drawn up in a year. It passed the first on March 12, 2020, the same day Northam declared a public health emergency that led to the suspension of more than $2 billion in proposed new spending. The assembly passed a second during last fall’s special session under the shadow of a potential multibillion-dollar shortfall that has not been as large as feared.
“The past year has been marked by untold hardship and hardship for many as a pandemic has swept through this state and this nation,” Senate Finance Chair Janet Howell, D-Fairfax, said before the committee unanimously adopts its draft budget.
“However, while there were challenges, I also saw resilience and adaptation to what we faced collectively and individually,” Howell said. “Virginia’s budgeting several times this year required that same adaptation and sometimes redirection as our economy fluctuated.”
Both chambers are counting on federal aid from a $900 billion relief package passed by Congress on Dec. 27 to replace or augment public funds Northam had proposed in his pre-Christmas budget to pay for the distribution of COVID vaccines. -19, continue testing for coronavirus disease and tracking people who are exposed to it, as well as other responses to the pandemic.
The House has included $41.6 million in public funds and an equal amount of federal funds to pay an additional $12 a day stipend for every Medicaid patient in nursing homes over the next fiscal year to help them hire and to retain staff. Northam had given them a daily allowance of $20 which will expire at the end of June.
However, House Appropriations Chairman Luke Torian, D-Prince William, has warned that the possible disappearance of federal aid could threaten the state budget in the years to come if the Assembly commits to new expenses that it will not have permanent income to support.
“My worry is that the real storm will come next year when federal funds will have dwindled, but the needs in our core programs like health and human resources and K-12 continue to grow,” Torian said.
Therefore, the House budget would inject an additional $130 million into the state cash reserve fund, in addition to the $650 million proposed by Northam in its budget. If passed in the final budget, the additional money would increase Virginia’s combined reserve funds to $2 billion by the middle of next year. The Senate budget includes only Northam’s proposed filing.
The appropriations committee passed the budget by a vote of 19 to 2, former chairman Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, Republican gubernatorial nominee, and Del. Emily Brewer, R-Suffolk, voting no.
Both proposed budgets focus heavily on investing in education, particularly K-12 and early childhood programs, to help Virginia public schools recover from the trauma of the closure during the pandemic and to operate remotely, in whole or in part, in many school divisions across the state.
As a result, enrollment in public schools fell by 3.5%, threatening a significant loss of public funding for schools. Northam has included $513 million in its proposed budget to protect all school divisions from loss of revenue due to declining enrollment. The Senate budget held the governorship, while the House proposed to cut excuse funding to about $430 million.
Torian and House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, D-Fairfax, said the House plan would spend an additional half a billion dollars on public education, including a 5% raise for teachers at the instead of a single bonus of 2% proposed by the governor. .
Northam, in his opening address to the regular session of the Assembly on January 13, urged lawmakers to convert that bonus into an increase of at least 2%. The House plan includes $231.4 million for the 5% raise on July 1, while the Senate budget includes $139.8 million to give teachers a 3% raise on August 1, if revenues are sufficient at the end of the fiscal year on June 30.
The House wants to provide additional funding to help Northern Virginia school divisions deal with the cost of competing for teachers in the Washington metro area, as well as East Coast schools competing for higher salaries. for teachers in neighboring Maryland.
The House budget also proposes using $51 million from a new tax on electronic skill games to support local school programs to help students overcome “learning loss” during the pandemic through extended studies, summer schools, tutoring, and other services.
The Senate plan includes nearly $50 million to hire more school nurses, social workers and mental health professionals, based on pending legislation proposed by Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, Democratic candidate for governor. McClellan was seeking to fully fund the quality standards at a cost of over $462 million.
Both proposed budgets include more money for state employees, state-supported local employees, and employees of public colleges and universities. Budget lawmakers passed in a special session in October pledged $98 million for bonuses for state and other public employees.
The House budget includes $168 million to pay for a 3.5% raise, plus higher pay for registrars general and low-level social workers, and a $1,000 bonus for corrections officers .
The Senate plan includes $118 million for a 3% pay increase on Sept. 1 for local state and state-supported employees, subject to sufficient revenue at the end of the fiscal year.
The Senate also includes $28.4 million for the Virginia State Police that would be increased by a $4 surcharge on vehicle registration fees to pay for a compensation plan to recruit and retain soldiers from state, based on legislation passed by the Senate. The House budget does not address the issue.
The Capitol Police’s Virginia Division, also facing a potential loss of officers due to lagging pay scales, would receive an additional $846,907 as part of the Senate budget.
Higher education would receive an additional $84 million as part of the House budget to help colleges and universities moderate tuition fees to make attendance affordable. The Senate plan includes $73 million that institutions could use for financial aid, operations or other effects of the pandemic.
“Any support from the state is greatly appreciated and will allow us to avoid an increase in tuition fees for our undergraduate and graduate students for the third year in a row,” VCU Chief Financial Officer Karol Gray said Wednesday. .
