 |
|
|
Back
to the drawing board |
|
Down
But Not Out
Mark
Warner may have taken a pounding at the polls last week
for championing the sales-tax referenda. But
Virginians still want solutions for congested roads.
Call
it Karmic retribution.
Last
week, I drove down to Norfolk
to participate in Joel
Rubin’s
public affairs show on WVEC. Only three days before,
Hampton Roads voters had thrashed a proposal to hike
the sales tax to pay for a number of big-ticket
transportation projects. From my vantage point in
Richmond,
I’d questioned the wisdom of the
raise-taxes-and-build-more-roads approach to solving
traffic jams, and had specified a number of remedies
that didn’t require raising taxes. Intrigued, Joel
gave me a few moments of airtime to opine on what
the options were.
I
planned on taking Interstate 64 back to
Richmond that
afternoon, but as I approached the
Granby
Street
interchange, I spotted a long line frozen in place
on the on-ramp. Not one car was budging. Having no
idea of what the problem was nor how long it would
last, I retraced my steps back through
Norfolk,
aiming to cross the river over the Monitor-
Merrimac
bridge-tunnel. But even that was a chore: The
Norfolk-Portsmouth tunnel was a stop-and-go fiasco
all the way to the other side of the
Elizabeth
River.
It
was one thing to spin abstract policy ideas, I
thought as I stewed in my car, and quite another to
solve real-world problems like those confronting
Hampton Roads. Perhaps the region’s unique
geography, sliced by bays, rivers and estuaries,
created transportation chokepoints and bottlenecks
that defied conventional remedies. Perhaps in my
smug self assurance in questioning the tax hikes, I
mused, I’d brought the
wrath of the traffic furies upon myself.
A
little humility also might be in order for the
pundits who interpret the voters’ repudiation of
the tax proposals in Northern Virginia
and Hampton Roads as a devastating setback for
Governor Mark R. Warner. By skewering the two
referenda, anti-tax partisans certainly eviscerated
talk about taxes. But an intractable reality
remains: Virginia’s
roads are still crowded, and they’re getting worse.
People still want solutions. The battle is far from
over.
Warner
sounded far from defeated in his concession speech
Tuesday night. “I am not going to give up on
better roads and improved mass transit,” the Richmond
Times-Dispatch quoted him as saying. “I now
call upon those who opposed them to help us find
workable solutions.”
If
I were the governor's adviser, that's exactly the
tone I would urge him to strike. Indeed, I would
suggest, if Warner makes the correct political
adjustments, he can end up stronger and more popular
than ever. His challenge is to fashion strategies
that reconcile the public’s demand for
congestion-free roads with its steadfast resistance
to new taxes. If he can make that leap, the referendum debacle
will soon be forgotten.
Contrary
to the prognostications of some observers, Warner survived the election largely
intact -- the elections were always a referendum on
roads and taxes, not a referendum on Mark Warner.
Tax resisters railed against the Virginia
Department of Transportation, plagued by cost
overruns and political meddling by the previous
administration.
They campaigned against the General Assembly, which
had raided funds set aside for transportation
projects in the past. But the governor's integrity
and competence never became an issue.
At
the same time, the winners are weaker than they
appear in the flush of victory. The Northern
Virginia
opposition, in particular, comprised an unlikely
alliance of smart-growth environmentalists and
conservative tax rebels. With the election over, the
coalition will fracture. The two movements will
pursue very separate agendas.
A
final point: The anti-tax movement, despite winning
a resounding populist victory, did not produce an
elected leader[1] of sufficient stature to challenge Warner.
Prominent Republican legislators, who had endorsed
the tax-and-build measures along with the governor,
are in no position to turn around and criticize him.
Indeed, Republicans are far more likely to find
themselves alienated from their natural
constituencies than the governor, a Democrat, will.
The most likely outcome of the Nov. 5 election will
be internecine warfare between moderates and
anti-tax insurgents that keeps the majority party
divided and distracted.
The
bash-the-tax campaign did produce one rising star,
Sen. Kenneth
Cuccinelli,
R-Centreville, who won a special election this
summer and then led the charge against Northern
Virginia’s tax referenda. Cuccinelli may well
become a force in Northern
Virginia
politics, but his appeal will be limited downstate.
Playing on regional frustrations, he vowed to win
more money for
Northern
Virginia
by reworking the transportation funding formula for
divvying up the state gas tax. But his proposal is a
non-starter. Rural legislators, still a potent force
in the General Assembly, would resist furiously any
move to reallocate transportation funds, which they
regard as vital to economic development. The
governor, who rightly opposes the suggestion as a
“zero sum game,” also would fight the measure.
In
sum, although Warner suffered a setback, there is no
outside force to prevent him from regaining the
initiative. What happens next depends entirely upon
how he responds to last Tuesday's defeat. If he
reverts to the political consensus that prevailed
before legislators hatched the regional referenda
– the solution to congestion is raising state
taxes and building more roads – he will remain
vulnerable to the energized anti-tax movement. But
if he gracefully accepts the outcome of Nov. 5 as
the will of the people and starts looking for
alternative transportation solutions, he can regain
the political initiative.
In
fact, Mark Warner has the opportunity to build a
legacy not only as a can-do governor who averted
fiscal crisis and made government more efficient,
but as the first governor to ever address the root
causes of traffic congestion.
The
root cause of traffic congestion, as serious
scholars of urban development are nearly unanimous
in proclaiming, is the pattern of hop-scotch,
low-density, autocentric and pedestrian-hostile
development known in common parlance as urban
sprawl. For whatever reason, leaders of Virginia’s
business and political establishment are exceedingly
reluctant to acknowledge this fundamental reality.
Warner will have to break this taboo if he hopes to
make any progress in transportation policy.
A
no-tax-increase approach to transportation would
include the following broad elements:
-
The
Commonwealth must shift from a stance of
enabling development on the urban fringe, where
new roads must be built, to channeling
development back into areas -- primarily in
cities and aging suburbs -- where roads are
underutilized.
-
While
respecting the right of localities to control
their land use, the state should take the lead
in encouraging more traffic-efficient patterns
of urban design. Perhaps the Warner
administration could bring in top urban planners
from around the state and even the country to
create model zoning and development ordinances
along the lines of the neo-urbanism movement
that most localities could not afford to develop
on their own.
-
The
state should aggressively identify projects
capable of supporting tolls, then seek to
finance them through public-private partnerships
and the issuance of revenue-supported bonds. The
public doesn’t like tolls, but they’re less
hostile to them than taxes. Tolls, after all,
are user fees. Anyone who doesn't want to pay
them enjoys the option of commuting to work the
same way they always did.
-
The
Virginia Department of Transportation should
experiment with converting underutilized High
Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes to open lanes or,
where practical, to congestion-pricing toll
roads.
-
Rather
than blindly pouring money into mega road and
transit projects, the state should consider
alternative transportation modes such as
walking, biking and working at home. These three
unconventional options get little public
investment, yet in 2000 still accounted for
nearly twice as many of Virginia
workers as mass transit, which has received
billions of dollars in subsidies over the years.
I
have enumerated other no-tax congestion-
fighting
strategies elsewhere, so I will not belabor them
here. Needless to say, the options are
multitudinous. But it will take prodding from the
top for VDOT and local governments to overcome
decades of doing business as usual.
Some
of these policies are the appropriate domain of
Secretary of Transportation Whittington W. Clement.
But Warner is
fortunate to have on his team a highly qualified person to
tackle issues related to sprawl. W. Tayloe
Murphy, the secretary of natural resources, spent
years as a member of the General Assembly studying
land use issues. He understands the legal and
constitutional complexities of taming urban sprawl.
Murphy would add valuable experience and insights as the administration goes back to the drawing
board on transportation policy.
No
other Virginia
governor has dared to tackle sprawl. But the tax revolt,
traffic congestion, fiscal crisis and the
reinvention of government have brought all the stars
and planets into alignment. Governor Warner has been
presented an historic opportunity if only he will
grasp it.
--
November 11, 2002
[1]
One of the biggest winners from the
referendum may be Patrick McSweeney, who is neither
an elected official nor even a resident of either
Hampton Roads or Northern Virginia. The Richmond
attorney, who happens to be a
contributor to Bacon's Rebellion, campaigned
tirelessly and effectively against the tax
proposals.
|
|
