Supervisors face challenge of tough budget season

To say it's a budget season full of surprises might just be an understatement.

"You've got to remember that just in the past weeks we've found out about a $1 billion deficit in the state budget," said Prince William County Supervisor Frank Principi, D-Woodbridge, "and that we're going to stand to lose between $40-and $50 million in NVTA funding" because of the state court's ruling that the taxing authority of this transportation group was unconstitutional.

In other words, the budget proposal for fiscal 2009 should be considered "fluid" at best, he said.

"We've got another month, six weeks, to sort out priorities," Principi said. "Right now, there's a lot of moving parts to the budget, there's a lot of different drivers."

The county school system is facing an unexpected potential shortfall that ranges between $6 million and $20 million in funds, depending on what tax rate supervisors ultimately adopt. This past week or so, seven of eight board mem-bers sent a resolution to the board asking indirectly that members set a rate high enough to pay for all the superin-tendent's budget requests.

Brentsville's Gil Trenum voted no; in a brief telephone interview, he explained his vote stemmed from a campaign promise and ongoing effort to "build … and keep … a working relationship between the county board of supervisors and the county school board."

The resolution itself was written by vice chair Grant Lattin.

"Last year the county's schools received $32 million less than anticipated in county funding," read the resolution. "The School Board has recently been informed that it must cut an additional $6 million from the superintendent's proposed budget during this budget cycle even if the rate is set at the highest rate discussed by the Board of Supervisors this past Tuesday."

Maintaining the superintendent's request, however, is an unfeasible challenge, said Chairman Corey Stewart, who saw a budget season "that just isn't going to be generous" to any department.

"I think [the schools] need to find some savings," he said. "They need to focus their resources on teacher salaries and the 11th high school [under construction]."

Savings could be found by abandoning "an expensive math program [Math Investigations] that clearly is not popular with parents," Stewart said, and by "freezing the salaries of administrators and central staff."

In his resolution, Lattin had suggested that such advice -- which is akin to what was recommended by another su-pervisor in an earlier budget story -- was rooted in a failure to understand the realities of school funding.

Regardless, the county is facing some budget cuts and dilemmas, too.

Among the targets: A proposed 109 percent increase or $163,041, to the county attorney's office that was supposed to go toward the hiring of two more staffers to help with an expected rise in eminent domain cases.

"It was to hire an attorney to do the right of way work from [projects] from the NVTA funds," Principi said. "With the NVTA decision by the Supreme Court, that money is in jeopardy of being lost."

Set for closure, meanwhile, is a community health center that provides for lower-income patients.

The clinic opened years ago, after a group of citizens and nonprofit representatives asked that the supervisors help obtain federal grant dollars for its funding, said Melissa Peacor, assistant county executive, during Tuesday's budget discussions with the board.

The board agreed to partner; the county's two hospitals, meanwhile, ceded $200,000 of funding to the clinic as additional assistance. The federal dollars never materialized, however.

"They are serving patients and it's not a small number they're serving," Peacor said. "But right now, we are the main funders of [the clinic] and that's not the way it was presented to the community."

More solid talks on the budget are likely to develop after supervisors meet Tuesday and set the tax rate for adver-tisement. Normally, that process -- which only puts a ceiling to the highest rate that can be adopted -- moves along quicker and does not result in four failed votes and weeks of delay, said Supervisor Michael May, R-Occoquan.

"I think this is kind of uncommon," he said, adding that this year is his second time experiencing budget season as a seated board member. "But in a tough budget year, you want to be as close as possible to where you are" in actual numbers.

Staff writer Cheryl Chumley can be reached at 703-670-1907.