The General Assembly will consider a stop-gap budget bill to buy time for the House of Delegates and Senate to bridge their wide differences over $1 billion in tax cuts that Gov. Glenn Youngkin proposed in revisions to the two-year budget adopted a year ago.
House and Senate budget negotiators regrouped on Saturday after a blowup the previous day about the amount of tax cuts that the Senate would accept and the reduced spending it would require in Democratic priorities.
One of the pieces of the stopgap bill is money to compensate for a $201 million mistake in the amount of money the Department of Education estimated local school divisions that they would get from the budget adopted in June.
The budget itself did not include the mistake, but school divisions based their current year budgets on the department estimates.The Senate version of the budget shifted $58.1 million to cover the estimated gap in the current year, but the House budget included $5 million and relied on additional sales tax revenues to make up the difference. “We’re going to make everybody whole and then some,” House Appropriations Chair Barry Knight said.
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
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