VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local

At a little before 6pm Sunday, both houses of the legislature completed this session and adjourned sine die. The extra day of session was to deal with the budget, which covers the next two years of operations for the Commonwealth.

With a $4.2 billion shortfall, some hard choices had to be made.  The budget is available for for perusal here. A decent rundown of what it entails can be found here.

The legislature may be done with their part, but a lot of hard work is still left to be done at the local level. $250 million in cuts for education mean that local school boards are going to be looking to local councils to help make up the shortfall. The 2011 Norfolk School Board budget has already considered some of that in its calculations, with a $27 million smaller budget this year than last year.  Now that the numbers are final, it will be interesting to see what the numbers look like by the time the Board meets this coming Wednesday and when the budget is adopted on March 24.

Norfolk is in the midst of creating its budget for the year beginning July 1, 2010. The budget will be presented to City Council on April 20, with two public hearings scheduled after that. (The budget schedule can be found here.) In reviewing the FY2010 budget (available from the City’s budget page), you can see that outside of revenues from the Commonwealth, the largest source of general fund revenues is – you guessed it – general property taxes. How much Norfolk will be impacted by cuts from the Commonwealth is as yet unknown, but with the decrease real estate assessments, we can already assume that city revenues will be down.

So it’s not sine die for local electeds – or for those of us who watch this process. The trickle down effect of the Commonwealth’s budget will not be pretty.

As I was reviewing the financial statements for Norfolk, I came across the organizational chart to the right (click to enlarge). Far too often we forget that the entirety of our government works for us.  At the end of the day, if we don’t express our opinions on what we think the priorities should be, we are abdicating our responsibility.  So if you live in Norfolk, go ahead and put on your calendars now the date of the budget presentation to council and the dates – April 28 and May 5 – of the public hearings.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Once the democratic process is corrupted, the scourge cannot be contained.

You see, change isn’t always bad, and standing still can mean you’re actually falling behind. To improve the outcome, the folks who continue to do what’s always been done should be outvoted — or replaced.

The two quotes above come from facing pages in last Saturday’s Virginian-Pilot. The first is from this editorial, where the topic was the establishment by the State Senate of a “kill the bill” subcommittee like that in the House of Delegates. The second is from this article, where the topic was the relocation of a basketball tournament.

In many ways, the two articles were talking about the same thing: the process by which things get done – or rather, don’t get done. I doubt anyone believes that our democratic process is anything other than corrupted: one only needs to look at what goes on in Norfolk or Richmond or Washington to see that. Part of the reason that the process is corrupted is that those who are in power are resistant to change – and our system of governance keeps things that way.

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