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To
one who closely followed the 1986 debate over the
transportation tax proposal of former Gov. Gerald
Baliles, the recent statements by Gov. Timothy Kaine
and others who propose raising taxes by $1 billion a
year for transportation sound eerily familiar. We
heard the same false promises 20 years ago.
This
time around, politicians should be held strictly
accountable for what they say to win support for a
tax hike. If new taxes are enacted, those
politicians who promised Virginians that the new tax
revenues would relieve congestion and assure a
reliable, long-term source of funding for all
transportation programs had better hope for a
different outcome than occurred after the 1986 tax
hike.
There
has been no serious effort by the news media to
press tax proponents to support their claims or to
explain why a different result should be expected
this time.
A
1989 Senate Finance Committee report confirmed that
the 1986 tax hike hardly made a dent in the
transportation funding needs of Northern Virginia
and Hampton Roads. Although the report claimed that
the new taxes had produced significant benefits, it
acknowledged that this new funding source would not
be a reliable, long-term solution.
A
January 1990 report to Gov. L. Douglas Wilder found
that anticipated transportation needs in 2010 would
grow to $36.8 billion. Baliles had been forced to
concede a year earlier that his transportation
initiatives were running out of gas.
The
media also refuses to explore whether the same
growth impacts induced by the 1986 tax hike would be
felt again. Kaine campaigned in 2005 on a promise to
give local governments enhanced authority to control
that very type of growth. Under pressure from
developers and to the chagrin of slow-growth
advocates who supported him in 2005, he abandoned
that pledge.
Kaine
now contends that, even though he abandoned this key
proposal, he won approval of several other land use
bills this year. But he fails to note — and the
media ignores — that the land use legislation that
was enacted already had the support of developers.
Kaine finally acknowledged that the principal reason
for backing off his growth-control pledge was to
secure the support of developers for a
transportation tax increase this year.
Baliles
took the correct procedural approach in 1986 by
calling a special session to consider his
transportation tax proposal. He did not insert it in
the state budget that year, as Warner and Kaine did
in 2004 and 2006. Instead, Baliles asked for an
up-or-down vote on his tax proposal. It was enacted
on its own, not because he used an extortion tactic:
holding the state budget hostage to win approval of
the tax hike.
Last
week, the media also gave a pass to U.S. Sen. John
Warner, who again inserted himself into the
deliberations of the General Assembly on a tax issue
as he did in 1986 and 2004. This time, Warner warned
state legislators that Virginia could lose matching
federal transportation funding if the budget impasse
isn’t soon broken and urged legislators to support
a tax hike, as if that were the appropriate and
constitutional way to break the impasse.
Not
one editorial writer remarked on the irony of a
member of the U.S. Senate lecturing a state
legislature about how to handle transportation
legislation when Congress enacted such a
disgraceful, pork-laden highway bill last year.
When
will the media begin to do their job?
–
April 3, 2006
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