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Highway
to Hell," the hit song by heavy metal group
ACDC, has now become the anthem for the
business/political/media elite's longtime obsession
with enacting a special transportation tax at the
regional ends of the I-95/I-64 corridor.
Last Tuesday, the ordinary people in Northern
Virginia
and Hampton Roads rejected the multimillion dollar
VOTE YES campaigns of the local Power Establishments
by overwhelmingly voting NO WAY to a regional sales
tax.
The usual pundits and soothsayers are saying this is
just your garden variety "Virginia Isn't For
Lovers of Higher Taxes" election event.
The old adage says hindsight is always 20-20. But
this truism is now in jeopardy, as Virginia's
"experts" are proving blind to the larger
political meaning of this dual rejection. They have
just witnessed one of those "critical
mass" events in Virginia politics, not some
generic, run-of-the-mill anti-tax votes occurring as
a matter of course all across the United States on
more occasions than not.
Yet all they can see is an election about the
governor and taxes, leading them to a journalistic
tug-of-war between a political variant of Freud's ego
and id. It is the new WoodStein media ethic, where
the reporter/pundit and the public official are now
in competition with each other.
The day of the reporter as observer, as factual
analyst, is no longer.
So be it. But I am of the old school in terms of
election analysis. The biggest mistake reporters
make is to assume endorsements from major political
figures or business leaders and newspapers have a
great deal of sway on populist issues such as the
Tidewater and NoVa tax issues. These are seldom won
on top-down issues; rather, they are bottom-up
campaigns because there would be no need for such
unprecedented measures if the politicians had been
doing their job.
So let's endeavor to think outside-the-conventional
wisdom box and try to put the "local tax
option" solution rejected by the voters on
Tuesday in its historic context. It was an idea
developed in good measure to get around the
short-changing of the
Northern
Virginia
region by the rural/Western/Good Old Boy legislators
long in control of the General Assembly. They wrote
the state formula's allocating how the tax dollars
sent to Richmond
are returned to the regions to provide education and
transportation services, among other things.
Thus, to put the vote last week into proper,
analytical perspective -- to understand why this was
a "critical mass" event -- we need to take
Jules Verne's Time Machine back to late 1988. Back
then, Gov. Gerald L. Baliles was on vacation
somewhere South of Florida, focusing on the
Transportation Issue as he often did. During the
1980s, the political and financial powers of the
Northern
Virginia
business/media establishment had grown dramatically,
overwhelming the
Richmond
Main Street
boys who had been the financial angels for the Byrd
Coalition ascendancy in Virginia
politics.
Northern
Virginia
had long been the political whipping boy of the
old-line establishment. Indeed, Gov. Mills Godwin in
the mid-1970s even suggested the Commonwealth would
be better off if someone took an axe and chopped off
the state around the Marine Corps in Quantico,
leaving the rest of NoVa for Maryland,
the District
of Columbia
or some other jurisdiction.
Clearly, and with good reason, the power-brokering
establishment in
Northern
Virginia
was increasingly unhappy with its domination by this
legislative outlook.
Gov. Baliles shared their frustration and so he came
up with the idea of giving localities in the
fast-growing region the right to enact their own
transportation levy. From the standpoint of pure,
governmental theory, the original formulation of his
idea, the one that germinated in the tropical
sunshine, is perfectly in keeping with Jeffersonian
conservatism.
But Baliles' reasoning for the tax measure
encompassed more than a Jeffersonian view of
trusting local residents to know best how to govern
themselves. There was also a far more practical
point.
Baliles agreed with the NoVa power establishment
that the region needed more transportation money.
Accordingly -- and here is the key for our 2002
analysis -- the governor knew the region had only
two basic ways, given the Dillon rule, for the state
to help them get this money.
One way was to persuade the General Assembly to
recalculate the allocation formulas. These were
skewed unfairly against
Northern
Virginia
,
as they were crafted to redistribute funds from the
wealthier NoVa region to the poorer areas of the
state.
Baliles himself supported these formulas, for he had
been born in rural Patrick
County
and had long planned to run statewide. Moreover, the
concept of trying to make sure the poorer children
of the state and their hard-working families can
make a better life for themselves is a traditional
American one. Thus, the state formula moves extra
tax money from wealthier areas to less wealthy areas
by broad consensus of all the Republicans and
Democrats in charge of state government over the
years.
Thus, there was always a tacit understanding in the
General Assembly to keep any public discussion of
these formula to an absolute minimum, as they are
filled with political land mines. It is often very
difficult for any incumbent to defend his or her
position even to voters who actually get back far
more tax dollars than they send in.
The business and political elite in NoVa, and
increasingly Tidewater, understood this reality in
1989. Thus, while knowing their regions were being
shortchanged in areas such as transportation by
existing state allocation formulas, it was not
possible to harp on this situation without
antagonizing their powerful friends in the General
Assembly and high places.
Accordingly -- and again, this is key -- the Baliles
idea for a local regional transportation tax was in
some measure conceived as a way to get around the
rural/Western/Good Ole Boy control of the General
Assembly. Since the formulas couldn't be changed to
more accurately reflect NoVa's and Tidewater's
growing size, then the only option available to the
business and political establishment was a local tax
where they would get to spend all the money in their
own region.
It was, as they say in game theory, the least, worst
option.
From the perspective of the power elite, it was an
ideal solution. The business/political leaders are
convinced the state needs far more road money than
it currently generates with the existing tax
structure. Accordingly, from their perspective, some
new revenue measure is inevitable. Thus, if they can
get one which lets NoVa keep all the new tax money
generated in the region -- especially if they can
spend it independently of VDOT -- it is the best of
all possible taxing worlds.
But during this 1989-through-2002 period when the
elite was selling this practical idea, something
else was happening in Northern
Virginia.
The resentment of ordinary citizens over the anti-NoVa
bias they saw at the General Assembly in Richmond
was building.
-- November
18,
2002
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