Can compromise be reached in two state budget debates?

In state capitols across the country, lawmakers are facing crunch time on fashioning next year’s budgets. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is trying to hit a reset in negotiations with the Democrats who control the legislature. Meanwhile, efforts to add housing and tenant protections have pushed New York’s budget talks weeks past the original deadline.

Youngkin has struggled this year to work with Democrats who took control of both chambers following elections last fall. The governor, who cannot run for reelection, has vetoed 112 bills so far this year. One of his most high-profile initiatives—luring the Washington Wizards and Capitals across the river to Alexandria—failed spectacularly, as legislative Democrats refused to go along with his plans for funding a new stadium development.

On Monday, though, Youngkin tried to reboot budget negotiations with Democratic lawmakers. He issued 233 amendments to the two-year budget that the legislature passed, which he said would scale back his ambitions to cut taxes while also scaling back Democratic initiatives. As extensive as Youngkin’s proposed revisions are, they are a step short of an outright veto, which is almost unheard of in Richmond.

The governor pushed for his “Common Ground Budget” at a news conference Monday featuring testimonies from cabinet secretaries and data-heavy presentations.

“I believe that this package of amendments that we’re presenting today can … get us there on time, with a budget that is clean, without tax increases and, yes, a bit frustrating to me, no tax decreases,” Youngkin said. “But that is what finding common ground is all about.”

Democratic leaders, though, appeared skeptical. Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell said his members still had “a lot of questions.”

“We have serious questions about whether or not this budget can be structurally balanced,” Surovell said, according to the Virginia Mercury. He added that the Youngkin’s news conference calling for the two sides to work together was “a distraction from the record number of vetoes this governor has issued,” Surovell added.

Earlier, Youngkin vetoed proposals to raise the minimum wage, tighten restrictions on gun ownership, allow for legal sales of marijuana, establish a state-run family and medical leave program, and protect out-of-state women seeking abortions in Virginia.

Lawmakers return to Richmond next week to consider Youngkin’s vetoes and his budget proposals.

Up north, in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders have had to pass four short-term budget bills to keep state government working past the beginning of the state’s fiscal year on April 1. There’s no widespread panic in Albany yet, but the repeated delays have stirred up unpleasant memories of budgets that were months overdue after the Great Recession.

In 2010, Gov. David Paterson and legislative leaders took until August to finally reach a deal. They only came to an agreement after Paterson started inserting spending cuts in the short-term extensions. Paterson’s successor, Andrew Cuomo, pushed through on-time budgets by threatening to do the same. Hochul hasn’t adopted the tactic, though, preferring to push for compromise with legislative leaders behind closed doors.  

Paterson told Gothamist that most people don’t get upset about the legislature’s blown deadlines. “As long as the agreement is reached by the end of April, by the next year nobody really talks about it,” Paterson said. “I do think that New Yorkers are more concerned with what's in the budget, as opposed to when it actually gets there.”

One major sticking point this year has been housing policy. Hochul has said she wants to include “carrots” for communities to build more affordable housing, after her efforts to push for mandates failed last year. One possibility is to revive a tax break for developers to build housing projects with affordable units, but the real estate industry and labor groups have not been able to agree on details of which developments would qualify.

Lawmakers are also considering changes for how much New York City landlords can charge tenants in rent-stabilized apartments for building improvements. But more than 40 Democratic lawmakers publicly announced this week that they oppose those efforts.

“Discussions to reach a housing deal continue to suck most of the air out of the negotiating room,” wrote Kate Lisa of Spectrum News. “State lawmakers up for election this fall are feeling a heightened urgency to finalize a deal to increase housing stock and strengthen tenant protections and rental assistance programs after major housing policy was removed from last year’s budget.”

Lawmakers could separate the housing package from the budget deal, as they did last year. But there are other stumbling blocks, too, including Hochul’s push to increase penalties for assault of retail workers, free bus service for certain lines in New York City, efforts to decrease the use of natural gas and even efforts to limit reimbursements for Cuomo’s legal bills from several ongoing lawsuits.

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News to Use

Trends, Common Challenges, Cool Ideas, FYIs and Notable Events

• POLLUTION: Federal court upholds California's vehicle emissions standards. A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to grant California a waiver to set its own tailpipe emissions limits and electric vehicle requirements.The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected a legal challenge from 17 Republican-led states and entities that sell or produce liquid fuels. The EPA in March 2022 under President Joe Biden restored California's ability to set its own zero-emission vehicle sales mandate and tailpipe emissions limits through 2025, reversing a 2019 decision by then-President Donald Trump. Also this week, the EPA issued a new rule that will require the more than 200 chemical plants nationwide to reduce toxic emissions that are likely to cause cancer.


• TRUST: Americans rate their governments less positively. State and local governments are seen far more positively than the federal government, according to the Pew Research Center, but ratings of all levels have taken a downturn from a few years ago. In an annual survey, it found that Americans’ views of their state government are mixed: 50% of adults have a favorable opinion and 49% have an unfavorable view. The results vary substantially depending on whether their own party is in power or not. Local government fares better with 61% of adults rating their local government positively, but still down from 66% in 2022 and 69% in 2019. Americans’ opinions on local government differ little by party, with similar shares of Republicans and Democrats holding favorable views. Confidence in lower levels of government may be better than in the federal government, Route Fifty reported earlier this year.


• HOMELESSNESS: California fails to track its homelessness spending or results. According to a new report by the state auditor, California doesn’t have current information on the ongoing costs and results of its homelessness programs because the agency tasked with gathering that data—the California Interagency Council on Homelessness—has analyzed no spending past 2021. Three of the five state programs the audit analyzed—including the state’s main homelessness funding source—didn’t even produce enough data for the auditor to determine whether they were effective or not. Homelessness services in San Jose and San Diego both failed to thoroughly account for their spending or measure the success of many of their programs, the audit found. The lack of data means state policymakers have little data to go on when they make funding decisions related to what has become one of California’s most dire challenges.


• VOTING RIGHTS: Nebraska bill restores voting rights to newly released felons. Lawmakers approved a bill Thursday that would restore the voting rights of those convicted of felonies upon the completion of their sentences, including prison and parole time. Currently, a person who has been convicted of a felony must wait two years after completing all the terms of their conviction before regaining voting rights. As of October 2023, 26 states and the District of Columbia had expanded voting rights to people living with felony convictions—that’s more than 2 million people, according to The Sentencing Project. On Wednesday, Tennessee lawmakers took a different path and killed a bipartisan bill that would have let residents convicted of felonies apply to vote again without also restoring their gun rights. In Florida, lawmakers weakened a 2018 voter-approved constitutional amendment to restore the voting rights of most convicted felons.


• ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: Biden grants $6.6B to chipmaker in key swing state. The U.S. Department of Commerce announced a $6.6 billion grant on Monday designed to commit the world’s top chipmaker to mass produce its next generation of microchips in Arizona, reports Politico. Boosted by the grant from the CHIPS and Science Act and additional loans and tax breaks, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company pledged to put up more than $65 billion as it constructs a third leading-edge chip factory in the state. At full capacity, according to the Biden administration, the new factory would churn out tens of millions of chips for the most promising high-tech applications: 5G and 6G smartphones, self-driving cars, and AI datacenter servers.


• PUBLIC HEALTH: How cuts to Medicaid hurt public safety. Public health researchers found that when people lost access to health insurance, the crime rate increased. In their study, the researchers examined crime rates in Tennessee before and after that state disenrolled some 200,000 people from Medicaid in 2005. They found that by 2007, the crime rate in the median Tennessee county had increased by almost 17%, with large increases observed in both violent and non-violent crime. “Losing Medicaid induced changes in economic standing, housing stability, healthcare use, and health, all of which are documented to be determinants of crime,” the authors wrote.


• SCHOOLS: Farm-to-school programs flourish in Washington. The state’s public schools get beef, pork and grain from local farmers, which means it participates in all three elements of farm-to-school: school gardens, food education and local food procurement. The specifics vary, but nearly every state has some kind of farm-to-school program. Washington’s was established in 2008, and since then, farm-to-school has exploded in popularity. Last fall, the Washington State Department of Agriculture received over $8 million in farm-to-school funding requests from schools, more than twice the amount of funds available. At least half of Washington’s districts are participating in some type of farm-to-school food program. The state expanded the program in 2021 using federal COVID-19 funds. Based on how the budget is written, the agriculture department expects that as federal funds run out, legislators will backfill the money with state dollars.


• VOTING: Despite a law requiring it, most Texas high schoolers aren’t signed up to vote. Texas is home to about 409,000 18-year-old U.S. citizens, according to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data. But just a little more than 39% of Texans ages 18 to 24 were registered to vote in November 2022. And that was the biggest decline in voter registration for any age group compared to the previous midterm election in 2018. Research has found that voting is habit-forming, and high schools are a critical training ground to initiating that pattern. A 1983 Texas law requiring high schools to distribute voter registration forms to students who are 17 years and 10 months old or older was intended to boost turnout among young voters. But the secretary of state’s office doesn’t track compliance. And schools that fail to distribute registration forms to eligible students aren’t penalized. The University of Houston’s Election Lab estimated in 2021 that only a quarter of schools were complying with the law, though that number is not conclusive.


• DOWNTOWNS: The real estate nightmare unfolding in downtown St. Louis. Cities such as San Francisco and Chicago are trying to save their downtown office districts from spiraling into a doom loop. St. Louis is already trapped in one, reports The Wall Street Journal. Fewer people today commute downtown, avoided boarded up buildings, empty offices sit empty, and shuttered restaurants and stores. The Missouris city stands as a warning to others: This is the future for America’s downtowns if they can’t reinvent themselves and halt the downward spiral.


• FOOD: New Washington apple needs a name. Washington has created a new apple variety—again. And its creators want you to name it. WA 64 is a cross between a Honeycrisp and a Cripps Pink, also known as a Pink Lady. It’s small to medium in size, pink and yellow, and has “exceptional eating characteristics,” according to Washington State University’s College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences.  Although the new fruit won’t be available in grocery stores until 2029, the university last week launched a contest to come up with a catchy name. Feeling creative? You can enter online by May 5.

Picture of the Week

Amid outbursts from gun control advocates in the spectator gallery, Tennessee’s GOP-dominated Senate passed a bill Tuesday to allow some teachers and staff to carry concealed handguns in public schools. The vote was 26-5 vote along partisan lines. The bill’s passage came a little more than a year after six people, including three 9-year-olds, were killed in a mass shooting at The Covenant School, a private Christian facility in Nashville. The mass shooting brought cries for gun control and even a measure to close the autopsy records of children. But Covenant parents opposed the measure to let teachers be armed, which includes a requirement they go through 40 hours of yearly training, psychological evaluations, background checks and approval by the local law enforcement agency and school officials. The legislation still awaits a vote by the full House.

Government in Numbers

16,000

The number of rape kits that a review by the North Carolina Justice Department in 2017 found had not been tested. This Tuesday, the state announced it had processed all of them, officially clearing its backlog. Officials credited a 2019 piece of legislation that mandated local law enforcement agencies submit sexual assault kits for testing to an accredited lab and provided funding for the State Crime Lab to hire new forensic scientists. With the passage of that law, the submission of sexual assault kits increased from roughly 600 a year to now 2,200. To make sure that a new backlog of kits never builds up again in North Carolina, each rape kit is barcoded so that prosecutors, law enforcement and victims can track the status of their kits.