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Our story so far: in Virginia, a Dem governor proposes tax hikes and new spending, a GOP Senate proposes much more taxes and more spending, a GOP House proposes a little bit of new taxes and minimal new spending. Stalemate and no budget; extended Assembly session; possible glimmerings of compromise with a bit more taxes and a bit more spending. And in Maryland: a GOP governor proposes no new taxes, considerable new spending, and will pay for it by raising fees and inviting in thousands of slot machines. A Dem Senate essentially goes along with the Governor's plan; a Dem...

I'll provide several links for those watching the action (and Tuesday had action aplenty) in Richmond. But to summarize: Tuesday afternoon the House Finance Committee created a compromise budget bill that raises nearly $1 billion over two years. Details are in the linked articles. Later that afternoon, House Speaker Howell blocked a committee vote on the bill. Originally this appeared to be because he didn't want the bill to be considered; however, it was really because he didn't want the bill to die in committee, and the votes weren't there to get it to the floor. A discharge petition move...

Excerpt: "A group of House Republicans plans to offer a compromise tax package Tuesday that would raise close to $1 billion by increasing the sales tax rate, the cigarette tax and other fees. The delegates' willingness to consider broad-based tax increases sparked threats by anti-tax organizations to seek their ouster in next year's General Assembly elections." . . . " Davis, who once headed the fundraising arm for Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, has privately told several Republican delegates that he will lend the prowess of his political machine to anyone who helps resolve the budget impasse, even...

Excerpts: "Statewide tax reform is essential to controlling local real estate tax increases by balancing the state and local shares of the cost of services. Further, the House of Delegates budget proposal has glaring deficiencies." . . . "But neglect of state obligations and accounting trickery are what got Virginia into this financial mess in the first place. The Joint Legislative Audit Review Commission, for example, reports that the state for years has fallen as much as $500 million a year short of its required contribution to localities for education based on a 1988 standard. When that standard was updated...

Excerpts: "Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. promised yesterday to find the money to pay for a landmark $1.3 billion education package even if the state legislature kills his plan to expand legalized gambling, though he warned that health care and other programs would suffer deep cuts instead." . . ."The time for being subtle has passed. [Having slots] is the majority view in the state of Maryland, clearly," Ehrlich told the crowd, which was assembled in part by lobbyists for the Maryland Jockey Club, which would be a major beneficiary of the governor's slots bill. "If the bill dies...

<p>And on the 77th day, House Republicans came up with a stop-gap solution.</p> <p>They hurriedly proposed a one-year, interim state budget yesterday to buy time until legislators and the governor reach terms in the taxing-and-spending dispute that pushed the 2004 General Assembly into overtime.</p>

<p>House budget negotiators are seeking to craft a proposal that would raise substantial dollars without including the bugbear of general tax increases, their leader said yesterday.</p> <p>"It's still the gap in that tax thing," Del. Vincent F. Callahan Jr., R-Fairfax, said of the major issue in the budget stalemate between the House and the Senate.</p>

An article titled "Revenues Up, Deficits Down" appeared in the National Review Online on March 25, 2004. It can be found online at http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_buzzcharts/buzzcharts200403250832.asp. The article purports to be referencing the updated long-term fiscal forecast released last week by the Congressional Budget Office. Following is an excerpt: CBO projections show the deficit falling next year and the year after. In fact, the deficit falls in 10 of the 12 years covered by this forecast, rising only a miniscule amount in the other 2 years. There’s also good news in the revenue department: As you can see in the chart above,...

Excerpt: "While the tax increases would be partially offset by a plan to slash state property tax rates, the proposal puts the House on a collision course with the more conservative Senate and with Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., who yesterday dismissed the proposal as "veto bait." "Clearly, these taxes are unacceptable," Ehrlich told reporters, hinting that Maryland lawmakers, like their counterparts in Virginia, could be summoned into a special session on the budget if the House tax plan is approved. ... "Some liberals, meanwhile, were furious that the plan would raise the sales tax, which falls most heavily...

<p>City and county officials from Northern and Western Virginia joined Gov. Mark R. Warner yesterday in urging state legislators to compromise on a state budget plan.</p> <p>They said the uncertainty of not knowing how much money local treasuries will get from Richmond is hampering their ability to govern.</p>

<p>Cranky lawmakers went home last night for several days of rest and recreation, still stumbling toward springtime reruns of their standoff over the Virginia budget.</p> <p>In their eighth day of overtime, the Virginia Senate and the House of Delegates again clashed over competing spending plans but nonetheless readied to renew negotiations toward a compromise.</p>

<p>The Virginia Senate returned yesterday to work on a state budget, proposing a compromise with a dramatically reduced price tag. The House of Delegates ground to a halt - but not before insisting its members be paid $115 per day for working overtime.</p>

<p>Gov. Mark R. Warner is calling the bitterly deadlocked General Assembly into a special session today to enact a new state budget, but the anti-tax House of Delegates is threatening to walk out and return home for perhaps a week or more.</p>

<p>With no budget compromise in sight, Virginia lawmakers played to the streets yesterday, groping to harness public opinion behind their poles-apart positions on taxes and spending.</p> <p>After a new House proposal to end the impasse appeared dead on arrival, delegates and senators - in the second day of a three-day extension of the 2004 General Assembly - bitterly accused each other of playing politics to duck tough decisions on repairing the state's battered finances.</p>

Worst is over for state, says KulongoskiThe governor notes Oregon's improving economy and political mood, points at progress and sets out initiatives Oregon has hit bottom and is on the rebound, Gov. Ted Kulongoski declared Friday in a speech aimed at boosting the hopes of a rattled state. The wounded economy is healing, the once-sour political mood in Salem has mellowed, and state government has begun to repair damage wreaked by billion-dollar revenue shortfalls, he said in his second State of the State address. "The worst is over," Kulongoski told a sold-out Portland City Club crowd in a downtown hotel...

<p>The House of Delegates and Virginia Senate steeled for a dramatic standoff yesterday over the state budget, passing widely divergent spending plans.</p> <p>One largely relies on additional cuts, the other on record new taxes.</p> <p>During a nearly five-hour session yesterday in the House, the Republican majority resisted efforts by Democrats to spotlight proposals that they said would weaken education, public safety, transportation and human services.</p>

Panel Adds Conditions To Slots Bill Excerpt: After several days of intensive back-room negotiations, the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee voted 11 to 2 in favor of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s plan to legalize 15,500 slot machines and devote about half the proceeds to education. The panel adopted a host of new wrinkles, however, including measures that open the door to slots in Cambridge, a river town on the Eastern Shore, but may preclude them at Rosecroft Raceway in Prince George's County.

<p>House Republican leaders sought to put Gov. Mark R. Warner on the spot yesterday, pressing him to declare whether he would sign a Senate proposal to have Virginians pay $2 billion a year in new taxes.</p> <p>Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, describing the Senate plan as "astonishing and mind-boggling," called on Warner to say whether he would sign it.</p>

Va. House's Fiscal MaestroCallahan Maneuvered GOP Into New Position on Taxes Pithy excerpts: "He holds in equal disdain senators who would, in his view, impose unnecessarily high taxes on Virginians to "go on a spending orgy" and "flat-earth" members of the House GOP caucus who "ask me for money for pet projects and then won't vote for a single tax increase." First elected to the House in 1967, he was drafting budgets before some of his colleagues learned how to multiply and divide." ... "When [House speaker] Howell and other House conservatives said state spending was out of control, Callahan...

<p>Gov. Mark R. Warner yesterday challenged lawmakers to make a decision about the popular car-tax-relief program that has stalled because of a soft economy.</p> <p>"Either finish it or change the extent of the obligation," said Warner, whose two-year state budget had proposed finishing the phaseout of the levy by 2008.</p>