At a fundraiser in Albemarle County, House Speaker Don Scott sounded ready to make a deal with the governor to quickly approve a new budget.
“The governor has some views that are a little bit different, and we want to try our best to meet him in the middle so we can get this budget done, because so many are dependent on it,” he told RadioIQ.
Like schools and local government. They need to know how much state funding they can expect. Senator Creigh Deeds said companies that provide credit ratings also needed to see that Virginia’s government was reliable.
“We’ve got this AAA bond rating we’ve maintained since 1938," he explained. "That keeps our borrowing costs down for just about every project that we construct in Virginia.”
Scott and Deeds agreed the new spending plan should provide more funding for public schools and higher education. They also hoped Virginia would begin to tax software purchased and downloaded from the Internet, something Speaker Scott said our neighbors already do.
“Tennessee, Maryland, Washington, North Carolina, South Carolina – they’re smart enough to have closed those loopholes," Scott said.
And Deeds hoped the governor would consider returning to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative – a program that requires polluters to pay for protection from and damage caused by storms.
“That brings hundreds of millions of dollars back to Virginia for flood control and for resiliency projects.”
Delegate Amy Laufer said the need for those dollars crossed party lines.
“Combatting flooding, a lot of these pop-up storms. These are affecting all the communities, whether you’re a Republican or Democrat.”
And the governor has a way of saving face if he wants to approve a return to RGGI and full funding of other programs advanced by Democrats. Since his office first calculated future revenues, it has found an additional one billion dollars to spend.
Legislators return to debate a new budget May 13 and hope to approve it by the 15th.
