On Monday, legislators opened a special session to pass West Virginia's 2016-17 budget seemingly no closer to agreement on a $4.2 billion spending plan than when they left town at the end of the regular legislative session on March 15.
As the budget session opened, Revenue Secretary Bob Kiss acknowledged that Tomblin administration officials have not closed the chasm between their plan to raise revenue to close a $270 million shortfall in the budget and legislators' desires to erase the deficit entirely or partially through spending cuts.
"The ramifications we're looking at now will look like child's play if we get past June 30," Kiss said, referring to the start of the new fiscal year on July 1.
In calling legislators back into session on the 65th day of the budget impasse, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin presented them with three tax-increase proposals, asking them to come up with some combination of the three to raise $270 million to close the shortfall.
However, Senate Finance Chairman Mike Hall, R-Putnam, said many legislators just won't vote for any tax increases in an election year.
"This is happening at a bad time," Hall said Monday. "There will be millions of dollars spent in the next election cycle."
Illustrating Hall's point, Senate President Bill Cole, R-Mercer, sent a strong message against two of Tomblin's bills - a sales tax increase of up to 1 percent (SB 1004), and a repeal of the sales tax exemption for telecommunications services (SB 1003) - by removing his name as a co-sponsor. Traditionally, the Senate president and the minority leader co-sponsor all of the governor's bills.
"I'm not about tax increases," Cole, the Republican Party's candidate for governor, said of removing his name from the bills. "The one that has a reasonable chance is the tobacco tax."
The Senate on Monday fast-tracked passage of a 45-cent-per-pack increase in cigarette taxes (SB 1005) by waiving any committee assignment and reading the bill a first time on the Senate floor.
Cole said he recognizes that some tax increases will be necessary to get through the budget impasse, and said, "We feel like there's some support for the 45-cent tobacco tax rate."
In the regular session, after the Senate advanced a tobacco tax bill on a 26-6 vote, members of the House Finance Committee soundly rejected a 45-cent hike (SB 420) by a 21-3 margin. The opponents in the House included anti-tax Republicans and Democrats holding out for a $1-a-pack increase.
Monday evening, House Finance Committee members began reviewing the tobacco tax bill but took no action on it.
Even with a change of heart in the House, a 45-cent hike, with corresponding increases in other tobacco taxes, would raise about $78 million a year - still leaving a hole of about $190 million in the 2016-17 budget.
Cole said he believes that deficit can be closed through a combination of spending cuts, sweeping accounts of reappropriated funds and dipping deeper into the state's Rainy Day emergency reserve funds.
Later Monday, Kiss told a joint meeting of House and Senate finance committees that West Virginia could close the 2016-17 budget shortfall with one-time funds - but that would merely postpone the budget impasse for a year.
"You don't have to be a math whiz to know you will eventually run out of one-time money," he said.
State Budget Office Director Mike McKown told the committees that, even if the Legislature approves $270 million in tax increases for the 2016-17 budget, the following year's budget would have a $118 million gap, assuming 2 percent pay raises for public school and state employees and medical inflation increasing PEIA costs - a gap that grows to more than $500 million if no new revenue is approved this year.
"We have a revenue problem, and we can't solve our problem simply by cutting our way out of it," said Kiss, who pointed out that Tomblin has cut more than $463 million in annual spending out of the base budget since 2014.
That didn't sit well with some legislators, including Sen. Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, who complained that the governor's special session call "ties the hands" of the Legislature, offering no legislative alternatives to raising taxes.
"If we can't cut government right now and make it more cost effective for the people of West Virginia, . . . then when can we do it?" Blair asked.
Kiss said structural changes in the government are worthy of study but are contentious and, probably, are beyond the scope of a special session. A former House speaker, Kiss cited his struggles to close the Colin Anderson Center, a state hospital, in 1998.
"Can we afford the number of higher education institutions we have? Can we afford a lot of the other things we do?" Kiss asked.
Hall noted that some House members have "expressed themselves publicly" about wanting to make up the budget shortfall entirely through spending cuts.
About a quarter of the 100 House members have signed national anti-tax activist Grover Norquist's no-tax-increase pledge.
Hall said balancing the budget entirely through cuts is difficult because public education and health agencies are essentially off-limits to cuts, requiring taking the $270 million in cuts from agencies receiving about $1 billion of the state's $4.2 billion general revenue budget.
"Higher education is the biggest of that number, but there's no interest to cut higher education in an irresponsible manner," he said.
Potential cuts to higher education have made headlines, as at least two public colleges this spring announced tuition increases on sliding scales to be determined by the size of state funding cuts, and after high school guidance counselors received letters last week indicating that the state cannot guarantee funding for Promise scholarships for the next school year until the budget process is completed.
Monday evening, Sen. Herb Snyder, D-Jefferson, called on fellow senators to move forward to end the budget crisis, even if they are hearing that the House will not pass the measures.
"This is a time for leaders to lead," Snyder said. "We should take a lead on what should be done."
Reach Phil Kabler at philk@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1220 or follow @PhilKabler on Twitter.