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The two chambers of the Virginia General Assembly appear to have ended their biennial stare-down over adoption of the state budget. Now, perhaps, Governor Timothy Kaine will sign the budget bill and stop talking about how he will keep state and local governments operating without the constitutionally required appropriations act.
And, just maybe, state legislators can get down to serious consideration of the transportation funding issues that led to the months-long impasse.
Serious consideration does not mean debating how much to increase taxes or how much debt will be authorized for new transportation facilities.
That should be the last issue considered.
As the decisive outcome of the two regional referendums in 2002 on raising the sales tax rate to fund transportation improvements in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads demonstrated, the public is way ahead of most elected officials and political commentators on how to deal with our most serious transportation challenges. Most Virginians know that simply spending more tax revenues will not solve, and may even worsen, their traffic problems.
The General Assembly tried to relieve traffic gridlock in 1986 by enacting what was at the time the largest tax increase in state history. As repeatedly argued in this space, that initiative was a dismal failure.
Yet the media continues to suggest that, since legislators haven’t raised taxes for transportation in 20 years, all that is required to solve our transportation problems is another huge infusion of taxpayer funding — as if that worked before.
Even if past tax hikes for transportation had solved congestion and mobility problems, there is no assurance that the same approach would work in the 21st century.
The General Assembly has a duty to look more carefully at the problems that prompt calls for greatly increased government spending on transportation to determine what strategies are likely to be effective.
Simply giving an additional $1 billion a year to the Commonwealth Transportation Board, no matter how well managed, is not a solution. It’s a political cop-out.
Better to do nothing than to repeat the mistake of 1986.
Kaine himself has recognized the folly of spending more on transportation in the same old ways.
The legislation enacted this year to authorize the transfer of development rights and the preparation of traffic impact analyses will be marginally useful at best and will have no substantial impact on the overall pattern of development. This hasn’t prevented Kaine from claiming that there is now an effective linkage between land use and transportation planning, which justifies pouring billions of new money into roads and transit.
If our transportation problems are indeed urgent, as Kaine and some in the legislature insist, there is all the more reason to avoid a thoughtless response.
Too much is at stake. Our elected officials should be open to new strategies to assure the people of Virginia that every reasonable option has been explored in the pursuit of the approach best calculated to address current and future transportation needs.
Let’s discard one fallacious concept before another step is taken.
The insistence of the Senate on “a reliable, dedicated, long-term funding source for highways, rail and public transit” is precisely the wrong strategy.
A dynamic economy, shifting public preferences, a questionable future for petroleum and rapid technological change call for a far less rigid approach and one that more immediately and directly ties the cost of the facility or service offered to the use of that facility or service.
That means user charges and project financing instead of tax funding.
A guaranteed source of tax funds will guarantee a non-responsive, risk-averse bureaucracy, intolerable inefficiencies and a subsidy-laden transportation system.
We can’t afford that course.
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May 30, 2006
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