Local legislators expressed mixed reviews about Gov. Robert McDonnell’s proposed state budget cuts.

Sen. A. Donald McEachin, D-Richmond, said he was dissatisfied with the current governor’s leadership style and budget cut plans this session.

McEachin said the people of Virginia elected McDonnell to make the tough decisions needed to manage the state, but he explained that McDonnell was failing to meet the standards of leadership that Virginians deserved out of their governor.

“I say, governor, go back and start over,” McEachin said.

McEachin said that Virginians deserved to know the governor’s priorities as the General Assembly worked to craft the state’s budget.

“What is lost in this discussion is that these are not just numbers on a page – these are jobs being lost,” McEachin said.

But Del. Christopher Peace, R-Mechanicsville, said he stood behind the governor and that the state must now deal with the contraction that the private sector had been reeling from for more than a year.

“I think it’s a moral issue,” Peace said in a phone interview. “We have to balance this budget and we can’t use the tax dollars of people who have already lost their jobs in the private sector to artificially prop up state government. We can’t say that state government should be insulated from the same types of things that the private sector’s already seen.”

In a bare-bones budget, safety-net and human services should take priority, Peace said.

“I think we need to do all we can to fund Medicaid and make sure that we’re providing for those who can’t provide for themselves,” he said, “but in terms of the bureaucracy of government, we can make things run more efficiently and if that means we have attrition and retirement and we cut funded positions that haven’t been filled, then we’ll have to do those things. Government is not immune to the economy.”

Del. James P. Massie, R-Henrico, also said he agreed with the governor’s cuts. Although he is not a fan of furlough days, he said he supported 90 to 95 percent of the plan.

“I think in the big picture, the governor is in synch with me and in synch with the Republican Caucus in the House,” Massie said. “We agree with him that we want to balance the budget without an income-tax increase; we want to balance the budget without a car-tax increase, and to do that it’s going to take $2 billion a year in cuts.”

McEachin was concerned with cutting services for children and the sick through a $731 million in reductions to K-12 public education aid and more than $300 million in cuts to health-care programs.

“We’re supposed to value car-tax relief over all of these other things,” he said.

McEachin said the governor’s proposed cuts would also cost thousands of jobs.

“The total job loss will dwarf his jobs plan,” McEachin said.

Sen. John C. Watkins, R-Midlothian, said this budget would be the most challenging that the General Assembly had seen in the last 30 to 40 years.

“Certainly none of us in the legislature today has seen a recession like this or the effects it is having on business and government,” Watkins wrote in a press release.

Peace said the budget that the House was working on would be a baseline—a worst-case scenario that would become slightly more comfortable through the negotiation process.

“By the end of session, when we come out with a final budget, things will look a little better,” he said. “But we’ve got to start as though we can’t rely on anything, you know?”