Gov. Justice often boasts about passing flat state budgets. This year marked the fifth consecutive flat budget our governor and legislative leaders have enacted.

This gimmick has been central to Gov. Justice’s bragging about budget surpluses month after month in order to build support for the sweeping tax cuts passed earlier this year that overwhelmingly benefited the state’s wealthiest households.

While most of us saw little if anything in our paychecks from those tax cuts, we see the consequences of the flat budgets that came with them throughout our communities every day.

Flat budgets mean that the state agencies and programs responsible for vital public services — our public schools, health departments, and childcare providers — cannot plan to spend 1 dollar more the year ahead than they did the previous year unless they cut that dollar somewhere else.

This type of budgeting is irresponsible and does not reflect the reality that stuff simply costs more over time.

The thing that cost $1 last year costs more today. All of us understand that. The cost of healthcare for state workers, materials used to fill potholes and fix roads, salaries that reflect the experience gained by valuable public employees over time, repairing aging buildings and infrastructure. All these things and other basic responsibilities of state government cost incrementally more year over year.

By refusing to account for this natural growth in expenses and mandating five consecutive years of flat state budgets, Gov. Justice is, for lack of a better way of putting it, refusing to pay the bills, and leaving our communities to deal with the cuts that follow. But it’s not just state costs that grow — revenues have been growing as well and should have gone back into our communities to fund needed public services. Instead, the governor and lawmakers diverted public funds to sweeping tax cuts, essentially ensuring that flat budgets will continue to be a reality unless we change our priorities.

I’m a product of West Virginia public schools and universities. I see every day the beauty of our state and the kindness and hard work of our people. But our priorities are not being reflected by Gov.Justice and lawmakers who are starving the public services that help our state and our people thrive.

Flat budgets mean no money to address our deadly jails and prisons, to fill critical staffing shortages in our public-school classrooms, or to serve the unacceptable number of kids in poverty and the foster care system. The impacts of refusing to keep up with the cost of public services are all around us.

As West Virginians, we would all do well to ask ourselves if what we see matches up with what Gov. Justice repeatedly tells us month after month after month.

With so many unmet needs ranging from affordable childcare to rising tuition costs that put higher education out of reach for so many of our youth, do we really see a surplus in our communities?

Seth DiStefano

Policy Outreach

Director, West Virginia Center on Budget

and Policy

Tygarts Valley High School, Class of 1997