Seek reform, brace for cuts

As money drains from the state funding trough, the feeders jostle. Among them, lobbyists for farmers, a group for whom we hold a special affinity and upon whom the economy in the central Shenandoah Valley depends. Like cattle responding to the rattling of grain buckets, politicians alighted in Hot Springs earlier this week for the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention, where candidates nodded reflexively in spirit to the group’s pleas to restrain the hands of budget slashers from agriculture programs. The bureau has its points, but reality dulls.

Driven by hard truths, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine already has cut by $8 million and four workers the departments of Agriculture and Services and Forestry and the Virginia Cooperative Extension. He is sharpening his budget ax now for return swings in the middle of the month. No one – including educators (never mind about the children) – will be spared, nor should anyone. A recession is upon us. Kaine, rose-colored glasses removed and inflated revenue projections exposed, stares into a widening budget abyss of $3.5 billion. Someone, everyone, must pay for the state’s taxpayers cannot.

“I think we’ll have to do business a little different than what we have,” Farm Bureau Federation President Wayne Pryor said Tuesday, pausing to concede as much between pleas for budgetary mercy.

Well, yes, business will have to be done differently, here and beyond, by people of all walks in every sector. Pryor cites a Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service study that says agriculture infuses the state economy with $79 billion and more than 500,000 jobs. “We didn’t reach that level without the help of agricultural research and state marketing programs,” Pryor said.

This justifies, he explained, additional money to help farmers protect the Chesapeake Bay. We have chronicled in these pages the impact of farm waste on the Bay and the South River, where bacteria have rendered the waterway unsafe for swimming. Assuredly, money will be needed to research technology to circumvent that problem. But where is that money to be found now in an era when even K-12 education, the queen mother of all sacred cows, is subject to cuts?

Similarly, the Farm Bureau wants more when others must do with less for farmland preservation, a noble ambition that gasps for air when the question of feasibility is raised. The General Assembly last year budgeted $4.3 million over two years as matching money for a Purchase of Development Rights program. That drew five municipalities into the program. We wonder why any bothered. Augusta County passed in no small part because many people, including plenty of farmers, questioned whether the money was sufficient to accomplish more than a minute fraction of its aim.

Where the Bureau has a cause worth championing is on the subject of eminent domain. Though Virginia has tightened considerably eminent domain law to the benefit of property owners, the bureau and others think there is more work to be done, principally in defining “public use.” State reform passed early last year required that eminent domain be used only to take properties for public use, not for private development. The measure also required that properties themselves be blighted rather than merely located in blighted areas, and it set parameters where there had been few for the term “blighted.”

The Bureau wants the General Assembly to similarly narrow the definition of “public use.” Safeguarding property owners – farmers and others – against government incursions on private land is a cause we support. History shows that government will drive trucks through those places where loopholes evince cracks. So let’s seal the fractures.

As Kaine and lawmakers seek with tied hands to cleanse the budget of gushing red ink, we suggest the Bureau invest its energies where they might bear fruit, not in seeking money where there is little to be had but in strengthening bulwarks against the invariable reach of government hands where they do not belong.