CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin chalks up the three-week special session on the new state budget as “part of the legislative process.”
Tomblin, speaking Tuesday on MetroNews “Talkline”, said it’s not unusual for it to take a while to get enough lawmakers on the same page to pass a budget in tough economic times.
“There’s give and take and finally in the end there’s compromise and that’s what happened,” Tomblin said. “It’s kinda hard to sit and point any fingers but that’s the process.”
Tomblin anticipates signing the budget bill (SB1013) when it reaches his desk sometime during the next few days. That signature will avert a government shutdown at the current end of the fiscal year. Lawmakers agreed to Tomblin’s bill that will raise the tobacco tax by 65 cents and his measures to increase funding to the state Public Employees Insurance Agency.
“The key to the whole thing was being able to raise some additional revenues to come in,” Tomblin said. “Even though we’ve been able to cut the budget several hundred million dollars over the last couple of years–that still was not enough to continue the government as it should be.”
The PEIA plan puts an additional $15 million into the program for the next four years that will cut proposed premium increases for retired state workers in half for the new plan year with the rest of the money used to build up the depleted PEIA trust fund, Tomblin said.
In the Tomblin administration six-year budget plan, fiscal year 2017 was supposed to be a year for surplus revenues but that all changed last fall when the bottom dropped out of the energy market, Tomblin said.
“We should have been able (with a projected surplus) to do things for our public employees and our teachers but there were other forces out there dealing with the price of natural gas, the price of coal, the federal regulations and the demand for coal, which changed the forecast we had four or five years ago,” Tomblin said.
In the end, the governor said he had hoped the legislature would have approved a 45-cent increase in the tobacco tax and a one percent increase in the consumer sales tax. He said that would have filled the projected $270 million revenue hole and not required any money out of the Rainy Day Fund. The budget bill passed Tuesday has just less than $70 million from Rainy Day.
With more revenue shortfalls looming, the next governor and next legislature will have to go through a similar process, Tomblin said.
“At least we’ve addressed part of the problems but the legislature and the new administration, the new governor, will be facing approximately a $250 million shortfall come January,” Tomblin said.