The dispute over whether to raise hundreds of millions worth of fees in Virginia has emerged as one of the largest fractures between the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-led Senate.
The argument is central to the legislature’s basic set of revenue assumptions as it looks to close a more than $4 billion budget gap. The Senate wants to blunt major cuts to K-12 education by raising the charges for a range of services, from court visits to marriage licenses to boiler inspections. Altogether, their plan would raise $326 million in new revenue over the next two years.
Conservative groups and House Republicans are looking to block those increases, likening them to tax increases, while Gov. Bob McDonnell, also a Republican, has not ruled out signing a budget that raises some fees.
“These are tough economic times, Virginians are being asked daily to dig deeper into their pockets while government continues to spend more, we don’t think it’s fair,” said Ben Marchi, Virginia state director for the anti-tax group Americans for Prosperity. “The notion of whether it’s a fee or a tax — at the end of the day it means more money out of working Virginians’ pockets.”
A small team from each chamber is negotiating to forge a consensus budget between two wildly different spending blueprints. Democrats say the House GOP has isolated itself even from an executive branch controlled by their own party by universally ruling out new fees.
“The House Republicans are an outlier here,” said Del. Dave Englin, D-Alexandria. “You got a Senate that has looked at what we can do on the revenue side of the balance sheet by passing some of these fees … they decided to take an extreme hard-line position and kill anything that would bring in any additional revenue.”
The issue could be one of the sticking points that threatens to drag the session into overtime. The General Assembly is scheduled to adjourn March 13.
