Bacon's Rebellion

Albemarle County is one of the most beautiful counties in Virginia, and Charlottesville is one of its coolest small cities. But the strip development on U.S. 29 North is one of the most god-awful products of the contemporary “planning” process you can find anywhere in Virginia. It’s as if Charlottesville/Albemarle took anything that could be remotely ugly or dysfunctional and smooshed it into an eleven-mile strip of state highway north of town Unfortunately, if you live in the region or travel through it, there is no escaping this horror.

Citizens seem serious about doing something, although there doesn’t seem to be a consensus about what to do. The Daily Progress has published a lengthy article describing the Places29 initiative and the controversy it is generating.

Places29, the product of local planners, provides what sounds like an attractive vision for the corridor (although the devil is in the details):

Electric lines vanish. New roads appear, giving drivers a way to avoid 29. Some commuters simply avoid the hassle by riding the bus. Walking is encouraged, because residents work, shop and play in coordinated communities.

And all it will cost is some $400 million.

The usual NIMBYs object to anything that might impact their neighborhoods, oblivious that by-right development will impact their neighborhoods anyway. And there’s always some joker — in this case John J. “Butch” Davies III, the local representative to the Commonwealth Transportation Board — who wants “Richmond” to pay to clean up the mess.

There are no magic wands for a place like U.S. 29 North. Fixing that monstrosity is going to cost money, and it’s going to take doing things differently than in the past. The longer the region delays in implementing a new vision, the more dysfunctional development that will take place. It’s critical to minimize future costs by getting landowners and developers to buy into a new vision as soon as possible. Then, through the use of Community Development Authorities, municipal bonds and some 30 or 40 years of re-development, the corridor might have a fighting chance. If key players are unwilling to adopt a long-term time horizon, any spasmodic effort at cleaning the place up is bound to be cosmetic and a waste of time.

How refreshing. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and Republican leaders in the General Assembly are finally talking to one another about transportation — and doing so cordially, no less. Judging by the multiple news reports, the lawmakers’ closed-door meeting yesterday was fairly productive.

Kaine must submit his amendments to HB 3202 by Monday, and the legislature has until April 4 to accept or reject them. Apparently, much of the conversation centered on finding areas of common ground.

Michael Hardy and Jeff Schapiro report in the Times-Dispatch: “The lawmakers indicated that there appeared to be major progress toward reaching a transportation agreement on a batch of regional tax and fee increases to raise more than $400 million a year for Northern Virginia and $200 million for Hampton Roads.”

Christina Nuckols reports much the same in the Virginian-Pilot: “Several of the 10 lawmakers participating in the latest meeting said they do not expect to reach compromise on every change the governor wants to make. However, they said they have agreed on most details of the regional funding plans for Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.”

Seth McLaughlin at the Washington Times notes areas of continued disagreement: “Mr. Kaine opposes paying the state’s debt with money from the general fund, which primarily pays for schools, police and social services. He also has legal concerns about charging repeat driving offenders larger fines and wants to reduce or eliminate the option for Northern Virginia localities to increase the commercial real estate tax. “

If this legislation passes, my concern is that legislators will declare victory and move on to other topics. My sense is that everyone has had a belly full of the transportation issue over the past three or four years, and that there will be little appetite to follow up with a second round of reforms. While HB 3202 does do some useful things — particularly in prioritizing road projects and devolving more responsibility for secondary roads to localities — it doesn’t come close to “fixing” the problem. More roads will get built, but congestion will not improve. Taxes will rise, but they won’t prove sufficient.

The Virginia Club for Growth released today a TV ad that will be broadcasted across the state in different television markets. The ad urges Gov. Kaine to veto the HB 3202, the Transportation Compromise Bill (AKA Bill Howell’s tax increase).

In the interest of full disclosure, the poster of this entry, Phil Rodokanakis, wants to remind everyone that he is also the President of the Virginia Club for Growth.

It’s interesting to see the line of argument developing in rural Virginia regarding the GOP’s transportation funding plan: There’s not enough money in the plan for non-metro areas. And Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is pushing the angle hard.

How can rural Virginia justify demanding more, when it already benefits disproportionately from the allocation of state highway dollars? It’s all about safety. Read this article in the Martinsville Bulletin.

Rural Virginia would get about one-fourth of the money the legislative transportation plan would yield, even though 61 percent of the state’s traffic fatalities from 2000 through 2005 occurred on rural roads, according to federal highway safety data. …

During a stopover in Stuart last week on his “listening tour” to gather input on the proposed $2.5 billion transportation bill, Kaine criticized the bill for its omission of significant help to rural areas. “What’s in this (bill) for rural Virginia?” Kaine asked, adding that the one-fourth earmarked for rural Virginia could only be spent on primary roads and interstates, under the current wording of the bill.

Of the 5,593 people killed in Virginia car crashes from 2000 through 2005, more than three-fifths — 3,398 — died on roads U.S. Department of Transportation highway accident data classifies as rural, according to a computer analysis by The Associated Press.

Crashes in rural areas are more often lethal because drivers reach greater speeds on the open roads, said Ray Pethtel, associate director of the Center for Transportation Research at Virginia Tech. Driver distractions, which cause most crashes, occur in rural areas and urban ones, Pethtel said. … “You don’t have on the rural roads the same safe design characteristics that you do on major arterials like interstates,” he said.

One of the main threads of controversy in the transportation debate right now is the propriety of devolving responsibility for building and maintaining secondary roads to local governments. Many local officials have objected to the transfer of authority, fearing that the state won’t send along the money to match. Remarkably, no one has seen fit to ask local officials in Henrico or Arlington Counties what they think of the idea. They would seem to be logical people to ask — after all, they have been handling their own roads for the past 75 years.

So, that’s what we’ve done. Bacon’s Rebellion dispatched Bob Burke to look into the experience of Arlington County and Peter Galuszka to take a look at Henrico.

Peter has filed his article about Henrico: “Doing It Their Way.” One message came through loud and clear: Henrico County officials like having control over their secondary roads. They say they can make better decisions and faster decisions, and that they can be more responsive to local constituencies than VDOT can. Henrico officials also like to set their own standards, which often exceed VDOT’s.

However, there doesn’t seem to be any way to quantify whether or not Henrico is doing a better job than VDOT would. Has the ability to align transportation and land use planning resulted in less traffic congestion? Can’t say. We asked for “levels of service” data, but Henrico hasn’t compiled it. Has local control resulted in more efficient expenditure of road dollars? Can’t say. Henrico hasn’t done the studies.

Bottom line: We can’t get answers to fundamental questions. Little wonder. No one in local government seems to be asking the questions, so no one is collecting the information. Meanwhile, lawmakers in the General Assembly — both those in favor of devolution and those opposed — are flailing in the dark. They’re basing their positions on hunch, intuition and anecdote, not hard data. We don’t have a prayer of solving our transportation problems in Virginia without the basic information we need to make informed decisions.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has introduced a new argument into the debate over the Republican transportation package: The cost of collecting the fees and taxes proposed by the General Assembly could run $80 million a year.

Reports Tom Holden with the Virginian-Pilot: “Kaine said administrative costs accompany all forms of taxation, but the unusually large number of fees associated with the transportation bill could take ’10 to 15 percent’ off the top of the roughly $800 million raised statewide.”

If the Governor’s “back of the envelope” calculations are close to correct — it will be interesting to see how vigorously the Republicans contest his numbers — the high cost of collecting the revenues constitute one more reason for killing the transportation-financing scheme.

In an address to the Hampton Roads Partnership, Kaine also said he would likely propose more than 100 amendments to fix “technical and some glaring” mistakes in the bill. According to Holden, the Governor predicted that none of the proposed changes would kill the bill.

Here’s the latest from Examiner.com: Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has vowed to block a facet of the Republican transportation plan that would impose a tax of $.25 per $100 of assessed value on commercial real estate in Northern Virginia. The tax, which has sparked heavy opposition from local governments and business interests, is a “non-starter,” the Governor says. “Apartment building owners are very concerned about that because it would mean rent increases for many Virginians. It would have a devastating effect on affordable housing.”

You gotta love that NoVa business community. Those guys have never seen a tax hike they didn’t like — unless they have to pay it. Then they suddenly become concerned about the impact of the taxes — not on them, the magnanimous souls, but on the little guy.

As far as taxes go, the tax on commercial real estate in NoVa is relatively painless. The greatest part falls upon the major commercial tenants such as the federal government and government contractors who can pass on their costs to the federal government. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. But some sliver of that tax would get passed on to apartment dwellers, and the Governor finds the prospect of higher rents to be unacceptable.

By contrast, Gov. Kaine does not find anything especially objectionable about higher motor vehicle sales taxes ($361 million in 2008), auto insurance premiums ($110 million) and auto registration fees ($108 million), all of which are included in his currently favored road-funding package.

Could someone please explain how paying higher rent is any more onerous than paying higher sales taxes, insurance premiums and auto registration fees? It all comes out of the same pocket. (As an aside: Is anyone besides me concerned about making auto insurance more unaffordable? Do we really want more people driving around without car insurance?)

The one principle that neither the NoVa business lobbyists nor Gov. Kaine seems willing to articulate is this: users should pay. Instead of taxing people for owning property, purchasing cars, registering their cars or buying auto insurance, we should require them to pay on the basis of how much they drive and when they drive.