Normally, I save Pat McSweeney’s columns for publication in Bacon’s Rebellion, but his most recent report is too important and too timely to sit on. According to McSweeney, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has yanked support for a bill that embodied his winning campaign issue: giving municipalities more power to block rezoning projects that would overwhelm the surrounding transportation system. This story has gone unreported as far as I can tell (in another example of the ongoing failure of the Mainstream Media to cover land use issues).
Here is McSweeney’s account of what happened:
Just last week, Kaine had another opportunity to honor his campaign promise to give localities greater authority to control growth. He was pursuing an amendment that would add his legislative proposal to a House-passed bill dealing with the use of cash proffers for road improvements.
That House bill had been reported by the Senate Local Government Committee on a unanimous vote and had strong support in the full Senate.Kaine abruptly withdrew his support for that tactic after actively pressing forward in that direction for more than a week.
The chief patron of the House-passed bill, who agreed to let Kaine use his bill as a vehicle to keep the governor’s growth proposal alive even at great risk to his own bill, felt let down by Kaine’s change of heart. Slow growth advocates expressed great disappointment upon hearing of the governor’s reversal.
Kaine’s official explanation was that he felt that the amendment might ultimately be rejected by the House of Delegates. Slow-growth advocates were more than willing to press ahead because they consider a recorded vote in the House on this measure a victory in itself.
The real reason for Kaine’s unexpected abandonment of this central element of his growth control strategy may be his desire to appease developers…
I don’t know if Kaine cut a deal with developers or not. I’m open to the possibility that there’s more to the story than McSweeney reports. And I’ll be the first to say that I had problems with Kaine’s campaign proposal, which I thought, if handled improperly, would have make development patterns more dysfunctional, not less. But if McSweeney’s report is accurate, Kaine has some ‘splainin’ to do. First, he broke his promise not to raise taxes until after a constitutional amendment protected transportation funds from budgetary raids. Now, he is betraying his Smart Growth supporters on their core issue.
Kaine may get away with this maneuver in the short run because Virginia’s political reporters have defined the transportation debate as a budgetary issue, all but ignoring the land use dimension, and the editorial writers in the major daily newspapers (save Richmond’s) are salivating for tax increases. But betraying the constituency that gave him his winning edge over Jerry Kilgore — and there is widespread acknowledgement that tapping the Smart Growth sentiment in Northern Virginia’s suburbs put him over the top — will not help Kaine govern in the long run.
Update: James Young at the Skeptical Observor has posted correspondence from Del. Robert Marshall, R-Manassas, who carried Gov. Kaine’s legislation in the House. A Marshall letter to Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, confirms the basis of McSweeney’s column and, indeed, may have been the basis for it. For some strange reason, Blogger is not accepting a direct link to Young’s article. Cut and paste this URL to your address line: http://skepticalobservor.blogspot.com/2006/03/kaine-ably-abandons-growth-controls.html
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.