The Legislature passed 201 bills during the 2014 Legislative Session. 51 of those bills came with fiscal notes attached, the price tags attached to legislation that inform legislators and the public of the estimated cost to the state in either expenditure increases or revenue losses. Fiscal notes are usually attached to a bill when taxes or fees are…
Tax and Budget
With the 2014 Legislative Session ending without the completion of the FY 2015 budget, Governor Tomblin has called the legislature back into a special session. The House and the Senate have their own budget bills, as does the governor. All three must be reconciled into one bill before the budget can be finalized. Read PDF…
Yesterday, the House Judiciary and Finance Committees both amended and passed out Senate Bill 461 and Senate Joint Resolution 14 that creates the West Virginia Future Fund. The amendments made several modifications to how much revenue will flow into the fund over time, how the principal of the fund is protected, and how the state…
Once again it looks like another year will go by without an increase in the state tobacco tax. This year it is quite surprising though as West Virginia is facing a severe budget crisis and raising tobacco taxes would essentially fix it all in one fell swoop. Nevertheless, our legislators seem intent on using our…
Governor Tomblin released his proposed FY 2015 budget last month and, for the second year in a row, made another round of cuts to programs and services instead of dealing with the state’s revenue problem. While his FY 2015 budget makes some improvements in public employee and teachers’ salaries, it continues to hurt the state’s…
An article in Sunday's in Wheeling's Intelligencer/News Register highlighted the growing cost of the state's business property tax incentives. The Marcellus Gas and Manufacturing Development Act of 2011 created a special tax preference for manufacturing facilities involved with natural gas liquids products (the famous "cracker bill" was an expansion of this legislation). The tax incentive gives a…
Surprise! West Virginia has a budget problem -- about a $200 million problem, in fact (you can read all about it here, here, and here!). Oddly enough, Medicaid, which for years has taken the brunt of the blame for anything budget related, has hardly been mentioned in the fervor. This is especially odd because the…
Bills introduced in both the Senate and the House this session propose to raise the tobacco tax in West Virginia by $1 per pack of cigarettes. While it is a big increase from the 55 cents per pack today, it would actually only catch West Virginia up to the national average ($1.53 per pack) while…
Recently, Revenue Secretary Bob Kiss and Revenue Deputy Secretary Mark Muchow made news by finally admitting that cuts in the business franchise and corporate net income tax, as well as cuts to the food tax, have cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue, to the tune of $360 million for FY 2015.…
The National Association of Budget Officers (NASBO) has released the Fall 2013 edition of its Fiscal Survey of the States. When we last checked in on the NASBO report, West Virginia was one of eight states cutting its general budget in FY 2014 from Fy 2013, with the second largest cut among the states. With…