Conferees making some progress on budget

By CHELYEN DAVIS

Date published: 6/10/2006

RICHMOND--Budget negotiators achieved a breakthrough of sorts yesterday afternoon, agreeing finally--after spending 10 days on it--on the capital outlay portion of the state budget.

House and Senate budget conferees said they had an agreement to spend over $1 billion on capital outlay--which primarily consists of building and renovating state buildings.

The two sides had been stuck on that issue since budget talks reconvened nearly two weeks ago, and the senators did not want to move on to other areas of the budget until capital was finished.

Now that it is, lawmakers say they might reach an accord on the whole budget by the end of next week--which is already pushing the limit for when they can get a budget approved and signed by the governor before the current budget expires July 1.

The legislature has gone a record amount of time without a budget deal--lawmakers were supposed to craft a new state budget for the next two years before their regular session ended in mid-March, and they still haven't done it.

At issue has been transportation funding, with the Senate pushing for increased revenue for transportation needs and the House resisting. The Senate finally took its transportation taxes out of the budget a few weeks ago, but the issue is still the elephant in the room in budget negotiations, because the Senate refuses to discuss transportation at all--awaiting a later special session in which to focus solely on the issue--while the House wants to cram as much transportation money as possible into the budget now.

The transportation problem is unresolved, but lawmakers say breaking the logjam on capital outlay will move the whole process forward faster.

Indeed, after they agreed on capital yesterday, the negotiators went ahead and resolved most of their differences in the public safety area. They planned to start on health and human resources later last night.

"Progress is being made," said Sen. Edd Houck, D-Spotsylvania. "We basically have capital done, at least where everybody's satisfied. At least we're working through them. We're having meetings. It's the first time since we've started that I've felt we're making progress."

Del. Phil Hamilton, R-Newport News, agreed, saying yesterday was a "very positive day."

Date published: 6/10/2006