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By Michael Martz
March 10, 2010 4:51 PM
The House of Delegates is abandoning a proposal to require local governments to pay back a portion of the state money they would receive next year for public education.
One of the architects of the proposal, House Appropriations Committee Staff Director Robert P. Vaughn, said today that he doesn’t think the payback proposal will be necessary to avoid violating federal rules for accepting stimulus money for K-12 education.
Vaughn expects the budget that emerges from a conference committee of the House and Senate not to drop state spending on K-12 below the 2006 level of $5.2 billion. That was the threshold for the stimulus law’s requirement that the state maintain its level of effort in supporting public education as a condition for receiving hundreds of millions of dollars for K-12.
“I don’t think we’re going to have that issue when we finally settle the budget,” he said.
Vaughn and Del. Kirk Cox, vice chairman of House Appropriations, delivered the same message yesterday in a meeting with Chesterfield County Administrator Jay Stegmaier, who said he welcomed the news.
Under the plan, Chesterfield would have received about $13 million for teacher retirement and health care credits next year, and then would have had to repay almost $9.5 million. With a school budget hole of more than $42 million, Chesterfield officials weren’t relishing the idea of returning money to the state, Vaughn said.
“We talked about the confusion of money coming in and having to be sent back,” Stegmaier said today.
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