BY WESLEY P. HESTER
Who says bipartisanship is dead at the Virginia General Assembly?
Del. David L. Englin, D-Alexandria, wouldn’t have been surprised last week to find one of his bills on the Conservative Caucus’s hit list, but he was a bit taken aback to see the caucus supporting his legislation.
Englin, a Northern Virginia liberal and co-founder of the Progressive Caucus, is sponsoring House Bill 1032, which would put five-year limits and any new or expanded tax credits or loopholes.
As it turns out, Del. Benjamin L. Cline, R-Rockbridge, co-chairman of the Conservative Caucus, had the same idea.
His House Bill 246 would implement the same five-year sunset provision while also requiring the state tax commissioner to annually report the estimated revenue loss of each state tax credit scheduled to expire within the next two years.
The idea behind both bills is to provide transparency and accountability requirements on tax preferences by forcing periodic review, the pair said in a highly unlikely joint press conference Wednesday.
“It’s unusual,” Cline said of finding himself side-by-side with Englin fighting for the same cause.
“I think whenever the most conservative and the most liberal members of the General Assembly see eye-to-eye on something, I think it’s newsworthy and I think its something that people should sit up and pay attention to,” Englin added.
According to a recent draft report by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, in 2008 the state had 187 various tax preferences with a price tag of $12.5 billion in lost revenue.
“In that same year, those same taxes brought in $14.3 billion,” Englin added. “That means that in theory, we could eliminate all those preferences, close all those loopholes and giveaways, and actually cut taxes and still end up with more revenue for core services in the commonwealth.”
The report showed that only 20 of those include reporting and evaluation of their cost and effectiveness, while 131 receive no regular oversight.
Cline said the sunsets would force legislators “to look more closely at their success rate and whether they deserve to be renewed or not.”
He added that the legislation was just a first step.
“Eventually we hope to start evaluating and analyzing the existing credits that are out there,” he said.
Gov. Bob McDonnell has not yet said whether he supports the legislation, though he did last week stress the need for an overhaul of the state’s tax code. Eventually.
“We haven’t done it in a comprehensive way probably in decades,” McDonnell said. “When a lot of these policies were put in place, we were primarily an agrarian economy.”
But McDonnell said that wasn’t likely to happen this year.
“A comprehensive reform that looks at exemptions and credits and preferences and rates across the board and sales and income is very heavy lifting,” he said. “I’m not sure we can do that equitably in the next 60 days.”
