The General Assembly adopted Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s amendments on Monday to the biennial budget in a culmination of months of uncertainty and back-and-forth in negotiations on the spending bill.
Adoption of the governor’s amendments on Monday finalized the biennial spending bill just one and a half days ahead of the June 30, 11:59 p.m. deadline before funding for the current biennium is slated to run out. The General Assembly narrowly avoided a state government shutdown that could have occurred if funding had lapsed. The biennium budget appropriates $75 billion in general fund resources and $207 billion in total expenditures aside from general fund allocations.
“We balanced the budget, protected our fiscal strength, invested in our people, and delivered real results without losing sight of our responsibility to future generations,” House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, said in a statement about the budget’s final passage. “This budget keeps Virginia the best place in the nation to do business while making sure working families share in that success. It delivers meaningful tax relief, the largest investment in public education in Virginia history, raises teacher pay, increases the minimum wage, lowers healthcare costs and provides funding for affordable housing.”
House of Delegates Minority Leader Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, issued his view of the budget and its negotiation process during an impromptu press conference after the chamber gaveled out Monday afternoon.
“We finally passed the budget and got it moving 100 days late,” he said. “We should have been able to do this sooner, quicker, so that our localities, our folks out there could be able to pass their budgets and move forward.”
Kilgore added that a lot of localities rely on money from the state to balance their own budgets, which are also due on July 1.
“There’s a lot in the budget that we don’t like, anything concerning [the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative], things of that nature, anything that’s going to cost our folks more money, but also there are things we do like — teacher pay raises and things of that nature,” he added.
Spanberger celebrated the General Assembly’s acceptance of her amendments and the finalization of the budget in a statement Monday evening.
“This budget also positions Virginia to be a national leader on data centers. I’m proud that we got a budget across the finish line that includes the first-of-its-kind statewide energy consumption tax on data centers I proposed this spring. Virginia has a responsibility to make sure the data center industry is paying their fair share for the energy they use. But this is only the beginning,” she said.
Language in the budget also directed a handful of state agencies to review the data center tax exemption and make recommendations, explore efforts to minimize the impacts of data centers on water, set noise standards, and collect data on energy, water and generation usage of the facilities.
The General Assembly will be able to respond to those reports in the 2027 legislative session, said Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, during his press conference.
He added that the months-long fight over tax exemptions for data centers was worth it after budget conferees were able to settle on a data center energy consumption tax. He added that the money generated by the consumption tax would allow the state to better protect itself from upheaval in federal programs brought by the Trump Administration and Congress.
“We went through a lot to get here, but at the end of the day data centers are going to contribute $1.2 billion over the biennium to help fund our government just like every other tax payer in our state and that extra money resulted in us being able to give a larger pay increase to our teachers, a larger pay increase to our state employees,” Surovell said. “We’re also able to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars for financial contingencies such as the coming Medicaid crisis we’re going to be dealing with.”
Spanberger sent her 14 amendments to the hundreds-of-pages-long budget document to the General Assembly Friday evening.
The governor’s amendments include the following, according to her office:
- Technical changes to align definitions in recently enacted leave programs;
- Clarifying language regarding identification of undercover law enforcement officers;
- Provide additional time to avoid creating a loophole in gun violence prevention laws;
- Make explicit that all customers in the residential, Small General Service, and church classes — including customers served by rural electric cooperatives — are eligible for a direct credit from the RGGI program;
- A change to provide cancer screenings for Virginia’s firefighters;
- A change to increase salaries for home care workers earlier than the enrolled budget’s 2028 date; and
- Changes to authorize a new state park in Loudoun County, provide further funding to the Department of Elections and support a scientifically sound research effort of the Atlantic menhaden population.
