THE LEDGER-STAR
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, December 27, 1994 TAG: 9412270231
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
Three top Democratic legislators say Gov. George Allen's proposal to cut taxes and build more prisons will cause a budget shortfall of between $450 million and $736 million in the 1996-98 budget.
Allen, a Republican, is to present the 1996-98 budget to the General Assembly in another year, but the legislators said they want to know now how the governor plans to pay for all his programs.
``We believe it is incumbent upon you to tell us specifically where the cuts would occur in the next biennium to balance the budget,'' Sen. Hunter B. Andrews of Hampton and Dels. Robert B. Ball Sr. of Henrico and C. Richard Cranwell of Roanoke County wrote Allen in a Dec. 22 letter.
``To do otherwise is to participate in exactly the kind of `worry about it later' budgeting that has gone on too long in Washington. The people of Virginia deserve better,'' they said.
The three longtime legislators have been intimately involved in crafting the state's budgets under the previous 12 years of Democratic governors, which ended with Allen's election in 1993.
They based their predicted shortfall on the cost of Allen's proposed tax cuts and the estimated cost of the 10-year prison-building proposal.
The state constitution requires the governor to present a balanced budget.
Ken Stroupe, the governor's press secretary, dismissed the letter as game-playing.
``These are the types of games tax-raising, fat-cat career politicians are willing to play in an attempt to guard pet projects and protect their own special interests,'' he said Monday.
Stroupe said the governor already has outlined for legislators how he would achieve the first year of his tax-cut initiative and also pay for other programs.
Allen proposed cutting more than $400 million from the state budget, a portion of which will pay the first installment of his $2.1 billion, five-year plan to reduce income taxes of Virginians and eliminate the gross receipts tax many localities impose on businesses.
In requesting what they called ``a fiscal blueprint'' through the year 2004, the Democrats said they need the information to make responsible decisions at the assembly session that begins in two weeks. by CNB