What a pleasant surprise when news takes a happy turn.
Gratifying as the tax breaks included in the state budget passed last week will be to the inflation-afflicted wallets of Virginia taxpayers — with a repeal of the state’s share of the grocery tax and an increase in the standard deduction from $4,500 to $9,000 per person — lawmakers also saw fit to take real advantage of the commonwealth’s flush coffers, to the potential benefit of all.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin has the power to amend the budget further before he signs it. The following items will directly benefit our region, and given that support from Southwest Virginia voters alley-ooped the former Rice University basketball player into the governor’s mansion, we hope he’ll cheerfully approve.
When we last checked in on a promising proposal by Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, that sought funding to study Catawba Hospital’s potential use as a treatment and recovery center for opioid addiction, the bill seemingly had been put on ice by the state senate’s rules committee.
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Yet Rasoul’s proposal is alive and well after all, as a version of it was included in the amended state budget.
A budget amendment provides $750,000 for the feasibility study Rasoul championed, which will examine what it will take to renovate the century-old hospital into a campus for state-of-the-art drug abuse treatment and recovery services in addition to the behavioral health services already performed there.
A skeptic might reasonably note that it’s one more study in a long succession of them, that have not resulted in meaningful action, but at least the chance to change that narrative is there.
The study is provided for as part of a review of the entire Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services that could end with recommendations for entirely new models for the management of the state’s mental health hospitals. Again, recommendation is not the same as implementation, but one must precede the other, so this necessary foot in the door is quite welcome.
Rasoul, who has made excellent use of his first year seated on the House Appropriations Committee, stressed the importance of having a facility in Southwest Virginia to handle substance abuse disorder issues. “We want to make sure we have these resources to help our families in need,” he told The Roanoke Times.
Building back our schools
The revival of the Catawba study was hardly the only good news for Southwest Virginia to come out of this year’s prolonged budget negotiations. Most notably, this budget at last takes significant steps toward addressing the state’s $25 billion crumbling schools crisis.
Governors and legislators have had a history of brushing off school construction needs as a responsibility of and problem for localities to solve, blithely ignoring that many local governments don’t have the deep pockets required to build a new $22 million elementary school, much less a $77 million high school.
There have been exceptions to that rule — notably including endeavors by Del. Israel O’Quinn, R-Washington, Del. David Reid, D-Loudoun, and the bipartisan team of Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, and Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D- Richmond. Their commendable efforts have yielded results after years of attempts that failed to gain broad support from their colleagues.
A budget amendment allocates $450 million to found a School Construction Assistance Program that doesn’t require cash-strapped local governments to add to their debt load, but does require those governments to show a commitment to making improvements. These grants don’t cover the full price of building or renovating a school, but aim to assist with 10% to 30% of a project’s cost. The locality has to be able to demonstrate financial need and show that poor building conditions exist that require repair or replacement.
An additional $400 million has been committed to a separate School Construction Grant program that can offer help with a wider range of needs, including equipment modernization and debts taken on for the sake of school improvements within the past decade. The budget also brings long-needed reform to the state’s Literary Fund that provides loans for school construction, increasing the minimum required size of the fund from $80 million to $200 million and increasing the maximum possible loan amount from $7.5 million to $25 million.
The overall investment in school construction in the new budget adds up to almost $1 billion, which lawmakers contend can be leveraged into more than $3 billion in construction activity and a chance to at last make a significant dent in that daunting $25 billion deficiency.
Slam dunks for SWVa?
The new funding for construction proves a welcome addition to a record-breaking state boost in spending on education that reportedly totals more than $19 billion. Also, the budget includes a 10% increase in pay over two years for teachers and other state employees, as legislators acknowledge the need to keep salaries competitive. To our east, economic development officials in Amherst County are rejoicing, as the budget holds a $25 million item requested by Sen. Steve Newman, R-Lynchburg, intended to alleviate the debt on the vacant 350-acre Central Virginia Training Center campus and free it up for new uses.
At our heart, there’s $500,000 for improvements at the financially challenged Virginia Museum of Transportation and $15.7 million for the renovation of a Carilion-owned building in Roanoke into a shared life sciences laboratory — the Star City will contribute $1.96 million to the latter project.
For the New River Valley and Hokie Nation, there’s $2.5 million for Virginia Tech to partner with Volvo in Pulaski County in pursuit of developing automated transportation technologies.
Could it be that, despite the foibles of this divided government, our region will start the fiscal biennium with a state financial plan worth celebrating? That ball is now in Youngkin’s court.