Spanberger on data centers: ‘I’m not going to break a contract the state has signed’

Virginia’s budget-making process, which should have been done back in March, is at a standstill, largely because of one person.

Senate Finance chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, has frequently and forcefully insisted that Virginia’s tax incentives for data centers give up too much revenue. The incentives are scheduled to expire in 2035. Lucas wants them gone next year.

Or maybe the budget is at a standstill because of two people. House Appropriations chair Luke Torian, D-Prince William County, has insisted that Virginia shouldn’t go back on its word, lest Virginia send a signal to other business sectors that it can’t be trusted.

That’s one way to view the budget stalemate. Here’s how Lucas sees it: All this is the fault of the governor and the House of Delegates. In a social media post Wednesday, Lucas said: “The Governor and the House are the ones that are gambling with our future by allowing the data centers to expand without concern for power, water, or paying their fair share of taxes.”

In a series of follow-up posts, Lucas zeroed in on Gov. Abigail Spanberger: “The Governor should be honest and tell the public what she won’t do — she won’t tax billion dollar corporations to provide long term revenue to help pay for K12 and public safety and to backfill the federal cuts from Trump.” And then: “That’s the budget hold up!! Once again, the Governor is wrong on the policy and knows Virginians will cook her if there is a government shutdown.”

With Lucas at loggerheads with both the governor and her House counterparts, it’s impossible to forecast how much revenue the state will have available over the next two years — and no budget negotiations have happened yet. The clock continues to run down, though, toward the start of a new fiscal year on July 1 — a fiscal year that so far doesn’t have a budget.

The showdown comes amid other tensions in state government, some of which I wrote about in Wednesday’s column — Democratic legislators unhappy with the vigor with which Spanberger has wanted to revise some of their bills. At the most recent Senate Finance Committee meeting, Lucas assured everyone that Virginia will have a budget “by June 30” — the last day possible. Some saw that as more than rhetorical, but rather as a signal that she might delay delivering the budget until the last possible minute, so the governor doesn’t have time to make the extensive rewrites she did of some bills.

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