Patrick McSweeney


 

Voters Want Substance

Transportation will dominate next year's General Assembly session, yet the press treatment of the issue goes no deeper than campaign platitudes and media handouts.


 

Virginians had not gotten past the long, hot days of July when the media become caught up in reporting on the 2005 statewide election campaigns as horse races. Even worse, some daily newspapers have run front-page articles on a public opinion survey about a hypothetical contest in 2006 between U. S. Senator George Allen and Gov. Mark Warner for Allen’s seat.

 

This type of media coverage crowds out reporting about the candidates’ policy positions and trivializes politics. It matters. Our republican system of governance can’t function properly if the electorate is generally ignorant or unconcerned about policy when choosing their leaders.

 

The system also doesn’t work well when voters don’t demand clear choices and fail to hold politicians accountable for campaign promises.

 

There are important policy decisions to be made in Virginia over the next four years. Voters should be encouraged to focus in depth on these questions. Candidates should be pressed to address them.

 

We might discover that election campaigns begin to have substance again. Who knows? Voter participation might actually return to levels not seen for a half-century.

 

Transportation is and will likely remain high on the policy agenda. Let’s examine a transportation issue that candidates have failed to address satisfactorily even though it cries out for resolution: How can we properly link land use and transportation planning?

 

For years, politicians have talked vaguely about the need to consider impacts on land use caused by transportation facilities. Some have pledged to achieve it without saying how.

 

Had candidates been pushed in the past to explicate full-blown policy positions on the subject, we might by now have found solutions or at least partial solutions. Sadly, we are no closer to linking transportation to land use than we were decades ago.

 

Are candidates afraid to go there? Probably so, because if they do, they will confront tough political choices.

 

Any serious effort to link land use and transportation should involve the merging of responsibility for decisions in those two areas. A realignment of responsibility in these governmental functions will meet stiff resistance. If we want effective linkage between the two, we must either give a state agency such as the Virginia Department of Transportation the power to make land use decisions or give local governing bodies the power to decide when and where transportation facilities will be built, as well as the responsibility for funding those facilities, even if that means giving localities a share of the Highway Maintenance Fund.

 

Thoughtful debate about this issue during a campaign might prompt us to conclude that the problem is not simply the impact of transportation facilities on land use, but also the effect of local land use decisions on the cost of providing transportation facilities to support the resulting development patterns.

 

We have not adequately controlled the cost of maintaining our secondary roads. One reason is that most local governments approve developers’ proposals for residential and commercial development without adequate regard for the long-term cost of maintaining the road network that developers construct and turn over to VDOT to become part of the state highway system.

 

If responsibility for maintaining the secondary system were transferred to local governing officials, they might be more inclined to shape their development decisions to minimize the future maintenance costs they must bear.

 

Under the current system, VDOT can’t control those costs because decisions about where development will occur are left to local governing bodies. If we care, now is the time to find out where candidates stand.

 

-- August 8, 2005

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

Contact Information

 

McSweeney & Crump

11 South Twelfth Street
Richmond, VA 23219
(804) 783-6802

pmcsweeney@

   mcbump.com

 

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