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In
1932 the Byrd organization in
Virginia created the system for building and
maintaining state roads that, but for minor
modifications, remains in place today. Some people
say there's nothing wrong with the system that more
money can't fix. But others believe that Virginia's
road-building arrangements have failed to keep pace
with 75 years of social and economic change, and
need to be restructured from top to bottom.
Among
those who argue for far-reaching reform is Speaker
of the House William J. Howell, R-Stafford. “Current
laws that govern how government agencies operate,
the Commonwealth’s relations with its localities,
and the manner in which we address funding for roads
date back all the way to the 1930s," he said
when addressing the House Counties, Cities &
Towns Committee Sept. 25. “Any plan to improve
transportation that ignores one of the root causes
of clogged roadways – namely, Virginia’s
70-plus-year-old government land use policies – is
inherently inadequate, shortsighted and flawed."
At
the other end of the philosophical spectrum is
Sen. John H. Chichester, R-Northumberland. In
a Sept. 24 column in the Free Lance-Star, the
powerful Senate Finance chair did give lip service
to reform: "We need a two-prong approach:
reform and revitalization." But he made it
clear that the modest reforms enacted in the regular
session of the General Assembly are all that is
needed.
Wrote
Chichester: "The General Assembly made progress
on the reform front. We passed laws that better
connect land use and transportation planning; laws
that require performance measures to be used to
reduce traffic congestion and improve traffic
safety; and laws that promote private investment
through partnering opportunities. We do not need
more legislation to do what has already been done."
(My italics.) What Virginia needs now, he wrote, is
more revenue: both on a regional level in Northern
Virginia and Hampton Roads and additional revenues
"in the billion-dollar range" to address
statewide needs.
Straddling
the fence is Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. The Governor
campaigned on the theme that Virginia "can't
build its way out of traffic congestion." Kaine
continues to ask many of the same
questions as Howell: Can Virginia create a more
efficient transportation system by re-defining the
responsibilities of state and local governments for
maintaining and building roads? But he has aligned himself with Chichester
in pressing for a dedicated stream of new taxes.
The principles at stake should be crystal
clear. Yet the general public has no idea what those
issues are because the Mainstream Media, both in its
journalistic coverage and its editorial commentary,
for the most part has grotesquely oversimplified the
debate. The cartoonish characterization pits
practical-minded politicians (Kaine and Chichester)
who want to solve Virginia's transportation problems
through the only way possible, raising taxes,
against ideologues and obstructionists (Howell and his allies) who
oppose taxes and offer no substantive alternative.
Whether
Virginia's journalists have been blinded by their
partisan sympathies or they're simply too lazy to
dig deeper than the daily sound bites, I will not
speculate. In either case, Virginians are the
victims of journalistic malpractice. Virginia's
daily newspapers, with a handful of exceptions,
persist with a taxes/no taxes narrative that
becomes more detached from reality with each passing
day. (For details on the worst offenders, peruse the
Bacon's
Rebellion
blog.)
Bacon's Rebellion
will do its best to fill the void. This column
is the first of three that will endeavor to describe
the transportation debate that is now unfolding. In this column, Part I, I will
provide a historical perspective and outline the
broad issues at stake.
In
Part II, I will focus on a particular issue that
appears to have reached critical mass: Who should be
responsible for building and maintaining secondary
roads in Virginia's urban counties -- the state or
the counties? I will look at what's happening
already in places like Prince William County,
Spotsylvania County and the City of Suffolk, as well
as legislation submitted to the House of Delegates
and carried over until the 2007 session.
And
in Part III, I will zoom in on a proposal that's
more of a long shot: House legislation, also to be
carried over to the 2007 session, that would create
Urban Development Areas. The purpose of these
growth-management districts would be to encourage
more transportation-efficient patterns of
development.
Regardless
of how you judge the merits of the House
legislation, I think you will agree that the
sponsors are trying to address real concerns. The
legislative package is not just "a cover"
to avoid raising taxes, as charged by the shriller
critics and parroted uncritically by the Mainstream
Media. Spokesmen for key constituencies -- the
conservation lobby, the home builders, local
government
-- have expressed a willingness to participate in
the dialogue about the House proposals. That dialogue will occur, whether the
MSM chooses to cover it or not.
Del.
Clifford L. "Clay" Athey, Jr., R-Front
Royal, is one of the leading land use authorities in
the General Assembly. Not only did he serve as
mayor of Front Royal but
he is the only practicing land use attorney serving
in the legislature.
To
understand how Virginia's transportation system
works, Athey insists, you have to go back to 1932, when
VDOT took responsibility for building and
maintaining most of the state road network. Before
1932, all cities, towns and counties maintained
their own secondary roads, while the state was responsible for the major arterials that sewed the state
together. But the Great Depression pushed many
counties to the edge of bankruptcy. The landmark
legislation known as the "the Byrd Road
Act"(1)
transferred authority for most roads to the state.
Only cities and towns with more than 3,500 people
were exempted, along with Arlington and Henrico
Counties, which opted out.
Back
then, says Athey, the largest city in Virginia was Richmond, with 85,000 people. Seventy-five percent of the
population lived on farms -- and most secondary
roads were farm-to-market roads, not used for daily
commuting. The system worked pretty well as long as
Virginia remained mostly rural, he observes, and
even as the state began to urbanize in the 1940s and
1950s.
The
state constitution recognized the dichotomy between
urban and rural settlement patterns by giving cities
and towns the taxing power to provide urban
amenities such as water and sewer. Counties, by
contrast, possessed taxing authority to support
little more than courts, jails and schools, Athey
says.
Fifty
to sixty years ago, most new development in Virginia
was compact, and it usually adjoined existing
development. When growth occurred, cities and towns
annexed the territory and extended water and sewer
service to the population. Simultaneously, VDOT
transferred road-maintenance responsibility to the
cities and towns, paying what amounted to a stipend
per lane-mile to offset the cost. If cities wanted
to maintain roads to a higher standard than VDOT,
they could at their own expense. It wasn't perfect, but as
Athey says, "The system had a way of dealing
with urbanization."
The
Byrd system began to break down in the 1960s.
"Counties wanted to get into the game,"
explains Athey, and they pushed for legislation that
altered the dynamics of growth.
To
bolster their tax bases, counties won the right to
create Industrial Development Authorities that would
help them attract industry. Most manufacturing
facilities required water and sewer connections, so
counties then won the right to establish water
and sewer authorities. The emancipation of
subdivision developers from city water-sewer systems
opened up much of the
countryside for scattered residential development.
Most
notable of all,
counties challenged the cities' right to annex their
developed areas, arguing that cities were skimming
the cream of the county tax base. In the 1960s and
1970s, counties gained incongruous allies in the Civil Rights
movement. The white power structure in Virginia
cities, some argued, annexed white population
centers to dilute black voting strength. By the late
1970s, Virginia cities had lost the right to annex.
As
urban growth accelerated, city
dwellers spilled into the counties, bringing
expectations that local governments should provide an
urban level of services. Thus arose a new type of
political jurisdiction in Virginia: the urbanized
county. (In Hampton Roads, where former cities and
counties merged and took the city form of
government, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Suffolk
could be described as rural cities.)
While
these changes were taking place, Athey observes,
VDOT remained in charge of building and maintaining
county roads. For the most part, counties were happy
to let VDOT continue picking up the tab. What arose,
however, was a disjunction between transportation
planning and land use planning. Fast-growth counties
adopted zoning codes that mandated the separation of
residential, retail, office and industrial land
uses. The mixed-use pattern of cities and small
towns went out of fashion: Segregated land uses
meant that different modes of human activity --
living, working, shopping -- were physically
separated. Far-flung modes of activity had to be
connected with roads... roads paid for by the state.
Counties
also enacted subdivision ordinances, setting
development standards for residential subdivisions.
In theory, subdivision streets can be maintained by
homeowner associations. But counties don't want to
be on the hook if the associations fail to
deliver. To protect themselves, many
counties required subdivision streets to be built to
VDOT standards so VDOT could take them over. The
consequence of that decision, critics argue, is that
many subdivision streets are over-engineered for the
traffic they generate.
Localities
also have been content to see development occur in
the form of disconnected "pods" of
cul-de-sac subdivisions, strip malls and office
parks (See "Pod
People," April 2, 2006). Counties could
ignore the fact that
these disconnected pods forced people onto a limited
number of collector roads as long as VDOT, not the
counties, had the
responsibility for upgrading those roads.
Worst
of all, counties have made zoning decisions and approved
subdivisions with no thought to how expensive the
road networks will be to maintain. For instance, a
townhouse community of 100 households might require
a quarter mile of publicly maintained roadway to
connect it to the public road network. The same 100
households in a down-zoned area of five-acre lots
might require 20 times the number of lane-miles and
incur 20 times the ongoing expense. Many localities
use large lot sizes as a tool to slow growth but
they do so knowing that someone else -- the state --
will pay the cost of maintaining the infrastructure.
The
cumulative result of these and other trends --
including the transformation of Interstate highways
into local commuter roads, and the development of
home financing systems that favor subdivision-tract
development -- has been the scatteration of human
settlement patterns. In regions like Northern
Virginia and Hampton Roads, responsibility for
providing infrastructure to this amorphous, disconnected mass
is fragmented between VDOT and a dozen or more
local-government jurisdictions.
Virginia's governance structure, adapted to a mainly
rural economy, has failed to keep pace with changes
to human settlement patterns over the past 75 years. So
also have the institutions responsible for building
and maintaining state rails and roads.
Most
observers agree that the system cannot sustain
itself at the current level of funding.
Maintenance costs are soaring and will, in the
not-too-distant future, consume all state-generated
road revenues. Traffic congestion is paralyzing Northern
Virginia and Hampton Roads, and existing sources of
funds fall far short of what is needed under the
existing tax-build-spend transportation paradigm
to complete the mega-projects deemed necessary to
relieve the gridlock.
In
November 2004, the Warner administration, produced a
long-range transportation plan for Virginia entitled
"VTrans 2025." Among the startling
conclusions: The state anticipated transportation
revenues of $95 billion over the next 20 years -- $108 billion
short of what was needed. To continue Business As Usual would
require more than double the funds available, or an
average of $5.4 billion more a year!
Judging
by their public rhetoric, Sen. Chichester and his
allies believe that injecting a meager $1 billion or
more into the system can keep the system going
without the need for messy structural changes. Gov.
Kaine is more realistic. He wants the $1 billion a
year, but he also acknowledges a need to patch the
system. Speaker Howell and Del. Athey go further:
They think the system is hopelessly antiquated.
They're not willing to raise general taxes to
perpetuate a system that no longer works.
The
House leadership has called for a three-pronged
approach to transportation:
-
Reform
VDOT through outsourcing, privatization,
devolution of responsibility for secondary roads
to counties, the implementation of performance
standards and changes to the Commonwealth
Transportation Board governance structure. By
achieving efficiencies and setting priorities,
the thinking goes, the state can make its
transportation dollars go further.
In
the regular General Assembly session this spring,
lawmakers passed two significant pieces of
legislation advancing this agenda. One bill allowed
builders to "cluster" their houses on
smaller lots. For example: If a developer was laying
out a 20-house subdivision zoned for five-acre
lots, totaling 100 acres, he could cluster the
20 houses on 20 acres, and leave the
rest as open space. In theory, that should economize
on the lane-miles of subdivision road and other
infrastructure -- water, sewer, electricity, cable,
telephone lines -- that must be built.
The
other reform requires VDOT to conduct a traffic
impact analysis of major rezoning proposals in
fast-growth counties. Although the law has no legal
teeth -- there are no sanctions on counties that
ignore VDOT warnings -- a controversial pilot project demonstrated
this summer that VDOT can startle people into
looking at the long-term implications of land use
decisions. A political firestorm erupted in Loudoun
County when a VDOT analysis contended that
increasing housing densities in the Dulles South
area would plunge parts of Loudoun, Fairfax and
Prince William Counties into gridlock over the next
20 years.
However,
Gov. Kaine backed off a key plank of his gubernatorial campaign
that helped him win Northern Virginia swing voters
and arguably accounted for his victory. The plan,
backed by leading conservation groups, would have
given local governments more authority to block rezoning requests if the
resulting development would swamp the capacity of
the local and regional road networks.
While
Sen. Chichester argues that the spring 2006
legislation is sufficient, the House Republican Caucus
believes that reform has barely begun. As I will
explain in Part II, the House would create Urban
Transportation Service Districts to incentivize fast-growth counties to take over
maintenance of sections of their own secondary
roads. Urban
Development Areas, the subject of Part III, would require counties to
designate areas for growth to occur and would make it
easier for developers to build the kind of walkable,
mixed use communities found in cities and towns
before conventional zoning codes regulated such
development out of existence.
In
sum, two inter-related debates are occurring
simultaneously: How do we reform the system, and how
do we pump more money into the system? The media has
covered only one of those debates -- the money
angle -- and it has succeeded in mischaracterizing that one.
Gov.
Kaine, Sen. Chichester and their allies want to
raise $1 billion a year statewide, plus hundreds of
millions more on a regional basis, in
"long-term, sustainable funding sources"
to feed the system. But they've declared that the
money cannot come from the General Fund, where it
would "steal" from schools, health care
and other priorities. This much the press corps
managed to understand.
What
the Mainstream Media omits is context. No one
questioned the assertion that diverting monies from
the General Fund budget would deprive schools and
health care in a budget that is project to increase
from $13.8 billion in 2005 to $17.0 billion in 2006
-- 30.4 percent over three years.
At
the same time, Gov. Kaine and his allies have
refused to raise the money from the most logical source: the gas tax.
The gas tax has a peculiar virtue: By increasing the
cost of driving additional miles, it does more than
fund road maintenance and construction: It
encourages Virginians to
carpool, take the bus, telecommute, move closer to
work or pursue other transportation alternatives.
But
rather than increase the gas tax, Kaine, Chichester
and others proposed taxing obscure items such as insurance
premiums and car registrations -- apparently in the
hope that
taxpayers simply won't notice.
The
House of Delegates also refuses to touch the car
tax. The difference is that Bill Howell and his
associates consider it unconscionable to raise taxes
when state government is so flush with cash.
Instead, the House would divert discrete revenue
streams from the General Fund and borrow against
the state's ample bonding capacity to pump money
into the system for the next two years. Unlike the
Kaine/Chichester approach, the House
does not offer a new, long-term source of tax
revenue. Instead, House leaders hope to finance big transportation projects by soliciting bids from
the private sector under the aegis of public-private
partnerships, in effect paying for new construction through tolls.
With tolls, at least, there is a rational nexus
between those who
use the new facilities are the ones who pay for
them.
In
the long run, I have argued, the most logical
sources of "reliable, long-term sources of
revenue" are the gas tax and congestion tolls.
The gas tax should be structured to cover the
ongoing cost of maintaining the state road network.
I believe that motorists would be willing to pay
higher gas taxes if they knew the money was be
applied only to road maintenance, not to
build boondoggle projects in some other part of the
state. Congestion tolls would allocate scarce
roadway capacity during rush hour, keeping traffic
moving at optimal speeds all the while and
generating toll revenues that could be used to fund capacity-enhancing
improvements in the same transportation corridor.
As
determined as it may be to restructure Virginia's
road-building system, the
House leadership hasn't reached the point where it's
willing to endorse congestion tolls. But the
Federal Highway Administration wants to fund a pilot
project, and at least one House member, Del. Chris
Saxman, R-Staunton, has been agitating to bring the
project to Virginia. And even the Kaine
administration has backed the idea of congestion
tolls as a mechanism to fund the construction of new
lanes on Interstate 95 and the Washington Beltway.
The
fiscal controversy isn't taxes or no taxes, as the
Mainstream Media has portrayed it. The issue is who
pays. Should the state strive simply to match increases in
traffic with
increases in transportation capacity, or should it
structure the taxes/tolls in such a way as to encourage Virginia
motorists to drive less?
As
Virginians think about their transportation future,
they must delve deeper than the simple-minded
tax/no-tax mantra of the Mainstream Media. The
larger question is this: Can Virginia afford to continue down the road
of Business As Usual, or should lawmakers to
re-think the state transportation system from stem to
stern?
--
October 9, 2006
(1)
For an account of the 1920s- and 1930s-era
controversies over road funding in Virginia, see
"Senator
Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia: the Pay As You Go Man,"
by Richard F. Weingroff on the Federal Highway
Administration website.
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