Long before Gov. Jim Justice tossed a couple copies of his proposed spending plan onto the speaker’s podium during Wednesday’s State of the State address, it was pretty well understood it was going to be a “flat budget.”
A flat budget is the practice of keeping the same budget year over year, with no increases. Under the Justice administration, any extra money laying around after covering the cost of running an agency has been used for capital improvement projects, like fixing the roofs on jails and adding to the state road fund.
Justice’s proposed budget comes in at $5.2 billion in general revenue, about a $300 million increase from last year. That 5.7% raise, according to acting Revenue Secretary Larry Pack, is in line with inflation.
While the flat budget sounds like some Charleston-insider speaker, it is.
According to Kelly Allen, director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, inflation — think about how much the grocery bill has gone up over the last few years — has meant the money spent to keep the government running in 2019 doesn’t go near as far today.
She said if the budget was going to keep in line with pre-pandemic budgets, it would actually take $5.8 billion to just maintain operations on a 2019 level.
“This is yet again another austerity budget – agencies are just going to have to do more with less,” she said.
That more with less can mean departments letting buildings go because they can’t repair them, not filling vacancies and curtailing needed services, according to Allen.
Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, said he champions flat budgets precisely because it squeezes agencies and forces them to run as lean as possible. By doing that, Blair said it gives lawmakers a chance to see what the inefficiencies are in the state government.
That budget squeeze – combined with record inflation and the pandemic – has led to hundreds of job vacancies in the state’s jails and prisons, the state’s flagship university laying off faculty and CPS worker shortages, to name a few.
And Senate Finance Chairman Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, signaled Thursday that he’s prepared to sharpen his knife to trim the budget, grilling Pack about the $629 million in proposed surplus spending.
It gets a little confusing here, because “surplus spending” isn’t considered part of the budget, but is leftover money that can be used on one-time expenses. This year, those one-time expenses include up to $154 million to cover a Medicaid shortfall, $5 million to entice military veterans to move to the state and $10 million to cover a food pantry program.
Tarr, who has supported flat budgets, said he was worried that a lot of these “one-time expenses” will eventually become annual expenses. For example, this year, the budget saw a shift for the Department of Tourism, which had been covered in the surplus section for the past several years, back to the general fund, raising the department’s cost from $7 million to $30 million in the budget.