Good news to report to you today, as you might have already heard, the Virginia Legislature gathered again last Thursday in Richmond and together, we passed a budget through the House as well as the Senate that will be on Governor McAuliffe's desk first thing tomorrow morning.

Secretary of Finance, Rick Brown, announced a few weeks ago that based on the current deposits in the state treasury, revenue estimates in March were too high. updated estimates indicated that we had to reduce the approximately $96 billion biennial budget by $1.5 billion dollars and cutting a state budget is no easy task because there are so many critical funding items to consider.

As a result, many of our state government's departments received no baseline increases to their budgets, although we were able to protect investments in K-12 education, commitments to our state employee pensions as well as mental health services.

As a result of the revenue shortfalls projected by the Secretary of Finance, the Legislature has had to tap into the state's "rainy day fund" to the tune of $470 million in Fiscal Year 2015 and $237 million in Fiscal Year 2016. Had the legislature failed to produce a budget by June 30th, under state law the Legislature would have been prohibited from accessing the "rainy day fund" which would have required even deeper cuts to core-government services such as education, transportation and public safety.

The budget we just sent to the Governor does not include Medicaid expansion, however it does include very clear language that prohibits the Governor from acting on his own to expand Medicaid without the approval of the House and Senate.

Previously, the authority to expand Medicaid has been the responsibility of the Medicaid Innovation & Reform Commission, but with all of the speculation about the Governor possibly expanding Medicaid by executive order. The precedent  for executive action that bypasses the legislature is happening almost daily at the Federal level in Washington, D.C., so the House and the Senate thought it would be wise to make it clear that the authority to expend taxpayer dollars has always resided with the Virginia Legislature and not the Governor.

However, the issue of Medicaid expansion will probably be taken up in a special session of the Virginia Legislature where the issue can be weighed on it's own merits and not be tied to other important issues such as our schools, our roads or the promises made to our state employees.

As always, please don't hesitate to share your thoughts or concerns with me.  As always, I can be reached at [email protected] or (757) 321-8180.