Harville's hit the nail on the head

One of the supreme ironies of Virginia’s slowly improving finances is that during the Great Recession, the state was able to balance its budget with help from the universally hated American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the so-called federal stimulus.

Virginia did a lot of other things to balance its budget, of course, but stimulus money played an important role. It’s just that the role was too quickly forgotten by those touting the state’s fiscal management.

The same could be true if Coy Harville’s worst fears about the state government are realized and Richmond shifts more of the cost of providing services to local governments. Virginia’s budget picture could become a lot rosier — but not for the obvious reasons.

"Devolution is the shifting of state responsibilities to various local governments. …" Harville wrote in a letter to the editor, "The state’s war against localities" (Jan. 25, page A8). "Core local services that include public education, police, fire and social services are services that must be funded through the state and local partnership. ‘Passing the buck’ to localities only perpetuates increases in real estate and business taxes."

Harville should be so lucky to see many more bucks being passed down from Richmond. Devolution simply shifts the cost of certain government services from one level of government to another. Rather than a partnership, it becomes a burden by forcing local governments to struggle to pay bills that Richmond used to handle.

Worst of all, devolution doesn’t really advance the question of how much government we really need and how much we can live without. It simply pushes the costs of those government services down to local governments that are severely restricted by other state laws that tell them what kinds of taxes they can levy.

That, Harville worries, could lead to property tax increases in Pittsylvania County. The logic is not hard to follow — Richmond tells Chatham that it must start paying for certain things, but it doesn’t give Chatham any other way to pay for it than through the property tax.

Pittsylvania County has worked to widen its tax base over the past few years, but the pace of devolution could easily — and quickly —overwhelm what the county has done to help wean itself off its traditional dependency on the property tax as the main source of money to pay for local government services.

Forcing Virginia’s local governments to pay for things they haven’t been paying for isn’t good public policy, but it will make the state budget much easier to balance.

As for Harville and his colleagues in local governments around the state, they’re left to fight an obscure but important battle. If they lose, we’ll soon see the results in our tax bills.