Officials search for funds

Next year’s school classrooms could bulge with 30 or more students reading from out-of-date textbooks schools can’t afford to replace.

Students might not find as many art or music offerings.

Budget cuts could mean higher car tax payments. Slower police responses. Shorter hours at libraries and parks. No new road construction.

And inmates could sit in jail longer awaiting trials.

These are possible impacts as local governments make deeper cuts than ever during the worst economic times local officials say they’ve ever seen.

“We cut the fat in 2008, and cut the meat in 2009,” Staunton City Manager Steve Owen recently told a Senate education subcommittee. “Bone will be cut in 2010.”

The problem is threefold. 

Local governments are seeing either stagnant or decreased property and sales tax revenues.

Without federal stimulus money to stem bleeding in the state budget, cities and counties will receive less state aid when the new fiscal year begins in July.

That, in turn, might force cities and counties to offer less services and look at raising taxes to make ends meet.

The largest proposed cuts to localities are coming from five major areas, the first, education, said Neal Menkes, director of fiscal policy for the Virginia Municipal League.

Former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s budget proposes $1.2 million in cuts to Waynesboro schools, $1.6 million to Staunton schools and $5.5 million to Augusta County schools, on top of millions of dollars already cut from the systems’ budgets in the current fiscal year.

A second target is reimbursement for local car taxes.

Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore fought to eliminate the unpopular tax and convinced the state to pick up some of the tab. As a result, municipalities have been reimbursed for about 70 percent of the tax, meaning car owners paid only 30 percent of the levies.

If the state drops the reimbursement as Kaine proposed, car owners would have to pay the other 70 percent, or cities and counties would have to cut their budgets accordingly.

To keep taxpayers from shelling out more for this tax, Waynesboro and Staunton would each need to shave about $1.7 million from next year’s budgets and Augusta County would have to cut about $4.3 million.

“I don’t see how we can make it up,” Owen said.

Replacing the reimbursement with a 1-percent surplus on state income tax has been proposed, but that still wouldn’t provide local governments as much money as the reimbursement did, Waynesboro City Manager Mike Hamp said.

Local constitutional offices – sheriff’s departments, commonwealth’s attorneys, clerks of court, treasurers and commissioners of revenue – also are losing state money.

The state would take $251,165 from these offices in Waynesboro, $298,122 in Staunton and $1.3 million in Augusta County.

The state also plans to continue scaling back local contributions through the Comprehensive Services Act that help troubled youth, and to cut aid to police in Waynesboro by $677,335 and Staunton by $799,577.

While the General Assembly’s actions this legislative session will in part determine the city’s revenues next fiscal year, the picture that’s emerging is the bleakest Waynesboro Finance Director Patricia Nicosia has seen.

“In my experience we’ve never faced anything like this,” she said.

Both Waynesboro and Staunton are looking at all departments’ spending with a critical eye and are cutting in ways they never have before.

Waynesboro has remained under a hiring freeze for more than a year. Hamp has filled six vacancies with permission of the City Council, but more than a dozen vacancies remain.

He asked departments to reduce expenses by 5 percent this year and has warned that some cuts cannot be sustained beyond a year or two, such as with equipment and vehicle replacement.

Staunton has frozen about 30 positions and set stoplights to flash at night rather than going through their full cycles, hoping to save on utility costs.

Augusta County either froze or laid off 19 positions last year, Finance Director Jennifer Whetzel said.

Owen said he is asking even more of Staunton departments next fiscal year.

“We’re asking every department to bring us proposals showing how they can reorganize, privatize, consolidate, stop doing things and do things with less people,” he said.

Still, the potential for layoffs looms.

“We’re not taking any possible scenarios off the table,” Owen said.

Ultimately, the cuts will mean offering less services.

“You hear a lot of folks saying they want less government,” Owen said. “They’re going to get it. Hopefully, it will still be enough.”