by Dick Hall-Sizemore
I have been going through the individual budget amendments adopted by the General Assembly. I admit it — I am a budget nerd who finds this stuff interesting. Plus, in this instance, my immersion into budget wonkery had the advantage of providing a diversion from the omnipresent discussion of the coronavirus.
Budgets are a great guide to a government’s policies. Governments put their money where their priorities lie. There was a summary recently in this blog of the major amendments to the recently passed budget bill.
In addition to the major policy initiatives such as public employee compensation, education, and health care, it is instructive to examine the smaller amendments. They provide further insight into the legislative process (another area I find fascinating): Who has influence, what areas or policies are favored, etc.?
My original focus for this analysis was pork barrel amendments. However, as I was poring through the amendments, I was struck by the large number that were related to legislation that had a fiscal impact. Although I have not done this sort of analysis for budgets enacted in prior sessions and, thus, have no hard comparative data, it seemed to me that the number of such amendments was unusually large. In the past, when a bill was sent to the House Appropriations Committee or the Senate Finance Committee due to its having a fiscal impact, that was a death sentence. That was not the case in the most recent session, at least not for bills put in by Democrats.
Identifying pork barrel amendments was a little harder. Some were obvious; others not so much so. I chose to define pork barrel as any amendment that provided an appropriation to a single, identifiable organization, jurisdiction, or special cause. To be sure, there were lots of amendments that would benefit specific classes. This was especially true for amendments related to Medicaid, such as those benefiting dentists, anesthesiologists, nursing homes, personal care attendants, etc. There were also numerous amendments that provided additional funding for existing programs. I defined these as policy amendments and did not include them in the pork barrel list, which was long enough as it was.
This legislature did not invent pork barrel amendments. For many years, prior to 2011, a budget bill typically included several pages of appropriations to non-state entities. In 2011, the Attorney General issued an opinion declaring that such amendments violated the state constitution’s prohibition on appropriations to “charitable institution which is not owned or controlled by the Commonwealth”. (That opinion is discussed on this blog here.)
The Attorney General did say, however, that state agencies could contract with charitable organizations to provide public services. The General Assembly has been resourceful in utilizing this loophole. Most often, it provides an appropriation to an agency with directions that the agency shall provide a grant to, or contract with, such and such organization to do such and such. This year, the General Assembly added another layer of constitutional protection. Many amendments provide an appropriation to an agency with instructions that the money go to a specific county or city for disbursal to a specific tax-exempt organization for a specific purpose.
Obviously, most, if not all, of these amendments are in dire jeopardy as a result of the fiscal effects of the coronavirus. The pork barrel amendments are easy targets. Eliminating them will surely disappoint their beneficiaries, but will not affect any state policy or agency operations.
The amendments supporting specific legislation are a different story. They reflect specific policy choices of the legislature. For each of these the Governor has several options:
- Veto the bill and take the money;
- Delay the effective date of the bill and take some of the money;
- Sign the bill and take the money, effectively telling the agency to implement the bill with its current revenues; or
- Sign the bill and leave the appropriation in place.
I was surprised at the fiscal impacts funded for some of these bills. Based on my experience with agency budgets, in normal times (and the legislature was operating under the assumption that they were in normal times), I would have said, for many bills, that the affected agency could have implemented the bill with its existing resources. But, these are not normal times. There are large budget cuts coming and it would be a clear contradiction for the Governor to ask an agency to cut its budget and, at the same time, assign it new responsibilities.
However, there are some bills for which the projected impact is not as imminent as the agencies would have one think. One probable example is HB 974, which would expand the criteria for eligibility to apply to the courts for a writ of actual innocence and relax the standard for granting such a writ. Based on the increase in caseloads projected by the agencies, the General Assembly included in the budget a total of $1.2 million per year for the Supreme Court and the Office of the Attorney General to implement the bill. That increase will not occur immediately and it may not be as great as projected. The Governor could sign this bill and take the money without having an immediate impact on the ability of the agencies to implement it. If the caseload grows to such an extent that it has a detrimental impact on the agencies’ other required activities, they agencies can make the case in the next biennium for additional personnel and appropriations. In summary, rather than veto each of these bills solely due to their fiscal impacts, the Governor needs to examine them critically with special emphasis on the likelihood that the projected fiscal impact will occur in the upcoming biennium.
The tables listing the bills with fiscal impact and the pork barrel bills can be found here and here.) Each table has four columns: Agency/Beneficiary, purpose, amount, and sponsor. For the pork barrel table, two of those columns need further explanation. In the agency/beneficiary column, the agency actually receiving the appropriation is shown in parenthesis.
Most of the pork barrel amendments originated with formal requests submitted by individual members, which are included in the Legislative Information System database. However, the money committees are not bound to these written requests and some of the adopted amendments are not shown in the LIS listing of member requests. Most likely, these amendments came from members of the money committees, working with the subcommittee chairmen and staff. For those amendments, I have noted “insufficient information” in the sponsor column.
I fully realize that these tables will be red meat for many on this blog. The sponsors of the vast majority of them are Democrats, but that should not be a surprise. Elections have consequences.
I want to emphasize that the compilation of these actions does not necessarily constitute a criticism by me. Some I think are good; some I think are OK or am neutral about; some I think are absurd. My main objective is to shine more light on the budget process.
There are two other items related to the budget amendments I want to bring up: one I find ludicrous and one is serious. The first one is a language amendment directing the Capitol Square Preservation Council to use $50,000 of its current appropriation to develop interpretive signs regarding Massive Resistance for incorporation beside the statue of Harry Byrd in Capitol Square. It seems preposterous to have a statue honoring someone along with a sign explaining that this person was the author, and chief promoter, of one of the most shameful episodes, other than slavery, in the history of the Commonwealth. Presumably the proponents (unknown) of the amendment thought that getting the statue removed would not be possible, so the plaque would be the next best thing.
The second item is a recommendation that the Governor include, in the package he sends to the reconvened session, an amendment making the higher-ed tuition freeze mandatory in both years of the biennium, rather than optional and only in the first year, as it now stands. If such a tuition freeze is not mandatory, higher ed institutions are most likely to respond to budget cuts with tuition increases in order to make up for the lost appropriations, as they have in past years.
