Those funds, along with a revenue surplus of $129 million announced in July, gives the state enough to provide a one-time 3 percent bonus in December to employees with solid job-appraisal records — about a week-and-a-half’s additional pay before taxes.
It marks the third year in a row that Virginia has ended a budget cycle with more revenue and savings on hand than was required to meet budgeted expenditures.
Most of the “surplus” is already spoken for.
The first year-end bonus that state workers have had since 2010 will account for $77.2 million of the surplus.
“After five years with no pay raise, I am pleased we are able to reward our employees with this performance incentive bonus,” McDonnell said.
Actually, most state employees got a 5 percent raise starting July 1, but all of it goes directly to paying the worker’s share of increased contributions to the state’s public employee pension system, which has unfunded liabilities of almost $24 billion and is bracing for an oncoming wave of baby-boom retirees.
Virginia’s “rainy day” reserve fund gets $78 million, bringing its balance to $689 million, more than halfway back to where it stood before it was depleted to help the state cope with billions in shortfalls from the 2008 recession.
The Water Quality Improvement Fund gets $17 million. A new Federal Action Reserve Trust fund that McDonnell created this year to help the state cope with expected federal spending cuts as Congress copes with billions in deficits and trillions of dollars in debt gets $30 million. Nearly $21 million goes to the Transportation Trust Fund. And $17 million will offset state relief costs from natural disasters in the past year, including an earthquake nearly a year ago centered in Louisa and Hurricane Irene.
State colleges and universities collectively mustered about $66 million in both general fund support from the state non-general money from business operations that the state is holding momentarily before reallocating it back to those schools. Another $66 million in non-general money other state agencies collected also returns to its sources.
When all the claims on the year-end balance are satisfied, it leaves only $41 million as an unencumbered surplus that McDonnell and the legislature may spend as they wish.
“After all of the things that the law already designates on where that money goes, $41 million is the remnant of the discretionary general fund surplus that now is up to me to make a recommendation to the General Assembly in December as to where that might go,” McDonnell told reporters after his address.
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