After a couple of hours of debate, the House of Delegates approved its version of a budget bill, although there’s yet another whiparound ahead as it goes back to the Senate for more changes.
The vote was 83-14. The 14 no votes were Republicans.
Yet, really, it’s the friends we made along the way.
For example, when addressing a difference between the House budget and the governor’s introduced budget, Finance Chairman Vernon Criss made reference to the state’s chief executive as “His Excellency” and then shared to 99 colleagues, “That was hard to say.”
In another moment, the finance chairman was again addressing how the House budget might vibe with the governor’s and told everybody, “we’ve never had a conversation with the governor.
“He has never darkened the door of the vice chairman of myself other than coming to sit on the bench to listen to Hope Scholarship. But he’s never come to us to talk to us about exactly what he has done on his budget.”
Love is in the air.
This came a day after the governor said he wants to collaborate on the budget, which was a day after he posted that he “will fight against the Legislature chewing up all of the resources” and less than a week after he posted “Tax cuts and school choice used to be page one of the Republican platform— guess House Finance Chair Vernon Criss hasn’t gotten that far.”
It’s a long and winding road.
The big issues still at hand are: Does the budget anticipate spending right up to the revenue estimate or beyond, will the final budget reflect the 5 or 10% tax cut the governor wants, will it include wide open financial support for the Hope school voucher program and will there be any extra dollars for the public schools?
The governor’s proposal, the Senate’s proposal and the budget bill that the House passed this week have been fairly far apart on those matters. None of the budgets right now have additional school funding, although bills reflecting that are still floating around.
Exchanges with Criss and his fellow delegates highlighted some of those cliffhangers.
“Since I’ve been here, we’ve had what has been described by his excellency as a flat budget and then you described the budget we did last year as like a skinny budget. How would you describe this budget that we’re about to vote on?” asked Delegate Kayla Young, D-Kanawha.
“Responsible,” replied Criss, R-Wood.
“Okay. I would say so, too,” Young said.
Then, Young asked about some overall spending differences: “So the governor was $5.49 billion. The House is at $5.46 billion. So our budget’s actually lower than the governor’s introduced budget. Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Criss.
“By, like, $33 million?”
Criss specified, “$30,515,410.”
“Okay, I keep getting a lot of texts saying that we need to stop the reckless spending in the House, but I just want to make clear, this budget is less than the governor’s proposed budget.”
Criss then asserted, “Yes, and to add to that, after we’ve done our due diligence on the governor’s budget, his budget was actually unconstitutional because he actually spent more money than he had revenue for.”
Young: “You don’t say.”
Delegates asked more questions about the possibility of a tax cut. That could be reflected in budgetary spending, but the tax cut itself would need to come in the form of a separate bill.
Delegate Henry Corby Dillon, R-Wayne, asked for clarification about whether the House’s amended budget bill would include a tax cut. ”
“Do I understand correctly that this amendment, as it stands— does or does not include any tax cuts factored in? If so, to what extent?” Dillon asked.
Criss responded, “There is a tax cut bill that the Senate has sent over. We will take that up at a later time when we start taking up Senate bills.
“The governor’s revenue estimates is what we’ve been led to believe. We’ve never confirmed that with him. But he’s led us to believe, or his administration, that a 5% has been adjusted in his revenue estimates. So there should be available to us to do a 5% tax cut.”
Dillon asked for additional clarification: “If we had found additional cuts somewhere else in the budget, would that have allowed perhaps for a tax cut of a larger size to be factored in?”
“Sure,” Criss said. “If you wanted to cut Medicaid or want to cut some other social programs or Hope scholarship, whatever, then we could probably do that.”