Now that an amended state budget is more than a month late, negotiators are running out of time to cut a deal.
In December, Governor Glenn Youngkin will unveil his next budget proposal, which means state agencies are already hard at work crafting the next two-year budget. Meanwhile, the budget amendments that were supposed to be in place a month ago are still caught up in a disagreement between House Republicans and Senate Democrats.
When the latest financial projections were released last month, Governor Glenn Youngkin was hopeful they could break the logjam.
"And I think that will be a catalyst for us to get together and to get past this impasse, which I think is far more politics than reality," Youngkin said. "And I'm going to inject some reality into it to make sure that what's best for Virginians is represented and that we can get a budget and move forward."
But Democrats criticized the governor's numbers as "voodoo estimating." Senator George Barker says it's possible lawmakers will never reach a compromise on the amendments.
“And I think we're making progress in terms of what we're dealing with now, and so I think we actually have a good shot at getting the budget amendments in place," Barker says. "But it does not rule out just sticking with what we passed last year and the skinny budget that we did in February."
The negotiations are expected to continue this week in Richmond, and both sides say they remain optimistic that some kind of compromise can emerge before state agencies turn their attention to next year's budget.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
