The Council approved our legislative priorities for the next General Assembly session last night. Download is here The big ticket items – BPOL & M&T – are still there and they’ve been joined by some items that almost double the City’s exposure! Safe to say that if even half of these cuts come to pass, we’ll not be talking about cutting museums or libraries, we’ll be laying off staff in droves, eliminating programs en masse, bailing out of the library system and the hits keep coming….here’s the most jarring piece of information of all:
BPOL – $2.8 million
M&T – $4.82 million
Communications Tax – $3.08 million
Roads – $3.26 million
Total $13.998 million which would equal 34 cents on the real estate tax rate.
The eliminations of the communications tax is a bit of new one. See, that was originally the “cell phone tax” that was approved by the GA about 10 years ago. It was a local tax and stayed local. At some point in the past couple of years, the inefficiency of collecting this tax at the local level became clear and everyone agreed the state would collect it, take a cut for their operating costs and remit the balance to the localities. The GA now believes this revenue is state revenue and wants to keep it all.
The Roads piece is also a new one. Roads have never been quite a simple as they appear. State roads in Counties and towns are maintained by the state. State roads in cities are differerent. The state has traditionally paid the cities to maintain state roads within their boundaries. They no longer want to do that.
If you look at all of this together, it’s hard to see how the GA is doing anything other than declaring war on her local governments. Honestly, I wonder why we bother. I know that those in Richmond are busy balancing their budgets on our backs but you would think they would leave our revenue streams alone while they’re busy forcing us to raise taxes so they won’t have to.
The impact on the City is hard to overstate. Since we’ve already cut our budget in real terms by about 15% the next cuts will be murderous. Those changes, if they all go through, will result in about $7 million in budget cuts. I promise you, the city government will be largely unrecognizable after these cuts. If all of the cuts go through, there won’t be a library, museum, parades, train festivals, arts, non-profit donations, road paving, sidewalk repair and leaf pickup is a goner. Parks will be shuttered. That will save about $3.75 million. The remaining ~$3.25 million bucks will come from tax increases, public safety cuts and public works cuts. Service times will go up and the majority of our public works maintenance programs will be eliminated. Mowing and street sweeping (which will clash with the states unfunded Chesapeake bay mandate) of any sort will be a fond memory. I’m not just crying wolf here. Oh, and the cuts to the schools will be about $6 million.
Of course, our hope is that our Delegate and Senator will side with us and help to minimize either the eradication of our tax revenues or the unfunded mandates. As a local government guy, I’m all about “replacement revenue” if tax funding sources are eliminated. Delegate Miller has always stood for (and campaigned on) the elimination of BPOL and M&T and that’s been that. Senator Colgan agrees that those taxes stink but also agrees that localities need revenue to educate children and police the streets.
We are meeting with both of our representatives next week to go over our priorities. I’ll report back on where our electeds are! Hopefully we’ll get some support and not have to completely disembowel our budget.