Stephanie
Meeks, acting President and CEO of the Nature
Conservancy was talking about her own organization
and its mission in her column entitled
"Finding Common Ground" in the Summer
2008 Nature Conservancy magazine. The
Conservancy, of course, is focused squarely on
protecting habitat that supports endangered
species. Its considerable success is driven by
volunteer boards in all 50 states, innovative
partnerships with public bodies and private
interests and growing international links.
But
Ms. Meeks could have been giving advice on a range
of topics to almost any group of leaders in
business, the non-profit sector or government when
she commented that the organization’s most
important attribute “is a knack for cultivating
productive relationships with the range of people
and institutions needed to find solutions and
advance change.”
As
the General Assembly of Virginia prepares itself
for yet another special session devoted to
transportation funding on June 23, it is difficult
to see the relationships among legislators that
are productive, not political, and the full range
of individuals and institutions -- governor,
delegates, senators, lobbyists, business groups --
that are needed “to find solutions and advance
change.” Narrow talking points and ad hominem
attacks that dominate media coverage hardly
inspire confidence.
Yet,
there is no other way to conduct the public
business successfully than by finding common
ground. Six straight years of failure to find a
comprehensive solution to the transportation
funding problem that penalizes every Virginian is
the exclamation point.
Gov.
Timothy M. Kaine, for example, has spent
significant parts of the last six weeks traveling
to every part of
Virginia
to hold town hall discussions about transportation
needs, current revenue patterns and possible
remedies. The needs include billions of dollars of
new, urgent investments in
Northern Virginia
and Hampton Roads that could be met with regional
plans and a shortfall in dollars for maintenance
that keeps sucking construction funds statewide.
The revenue patterns are clear.
Virginia
is below the national average in each of the three
main funding streams most states devote to
transportation -- a tax on gasoline, a piece of
the general sales tax and the percentage of sales
tax that applies to vehicles.
Many
members of the Hampton Roads and
Northern Virginia
delegations have come together to explore options
for their regions. Conversations among Democratic
and Republican caucuses continue on potential
remedies -- increase the sales tax on vehicle
sales, add one percent sales tax in the two
regions with the largest needs, dedicate 25 cents
of the grantor’s tax statewide to
transportation, add a one percent sales tax
statewide, impose the sales tax on gasoline, raise
various fees related to driver and vehicular
licenses, etc.
“If
we don’t fix transportation now, we will never
be able to fix it because we won’t have the
resources,” Virginia Beach Republican Del. John
Cosgrove warned his colleagues back in May. “You
need to take a look at what’s right and what’s
important and do your job as a legislator.”
Virginians
know transportation is a problem, even where it is
not the top priority. Gov. Kaine, for example,
finds nodisagreement in any of his audiences that
there is a transportation funding problem. He
counters patiently and effectively the arguments
that there are answers -- getting more federal
dollars, cutting spending, reprogramming money
from other programs, removing inefficiencies from
the Virginia Department of Transportation,
privatizing transportation facilities -- that
require no new state revenue dedicated to
transportation. These are the old “waste, fraud
and abuse” arguments of another century that
have little to do with falling gasoline tax
collections, $150 a barrel oil, a shrinking
federal transportation trust fund and the
world’s most mobile population.
The
Nature Conservancy’s Meeks suggests that her
group always has “relied on being a familiar
face that brings together the right people, at the
right time and place, to advance our common
objectives.” Meeks writes that the real strength
of the Conservancy has been to “build the teams
and broker the agreements necessary” to move
ahead.
Her
words also apply to the collective mission and
shared responsibility of
Virginia
officials on transportation funding starting
today. And it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong for
those leaders to take the advice of one
Loudoun
County
town hall participant, who suggested that
legislators be locked up in the Capital until they
reach agreement on the comprehensive
transportation funding solutions they have dodged
for six years. Some business groups already are
locking up campaign contributions to any
legislator until together as a group lawmakers
find common ground.
The
time and place are right for a solution. That
leaves whether
Virginia
has “the right people” as the real question
left to be answered.
--
June 23, 2008
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