Bacon's Rebellion

This cryptic passage appears in an e-mailed press release issued around 9 a.m. today by Del. Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, one of the conferees working on revisions to the state budget (my italics):

Based on the continuing constructive discussions between budget conferees for the House and Senate, I am confident that a budget agreement acceptable to both houses will be reached in advance of our regularly scheduled adjournment on Saturday, February 24.

The recent action by the conferees for the House on House Bill 3202, acceding to the Senate position on the amount of additional funding for transportation in the current budget – at least $500 million – removed what everyone recognized was the chief obstacle to a swift budget resolution. I concur with the widely reported sentiments of both conference committee chairmen – Senator Chichester and Delegate Callahan – that we are now in a far better posture to sort out any unresolved issues and achieve a timely budget compromise.

I’m not clear what this means. Does the $500 million constitute entirely new revenue? Is the General Fund off limits for transportation funding? If it turns out that the House has caved again, after already compromising once, the extremely loud noise you hear emanating from western Henrico County will not be a nuclear weapon or a volcanic eruption — it will be my head exploding.

Update: Chelyen Davis with the Free Lance-Star explains the significance of this development in her story yesterday. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t represent a terribly large shift in the House’s position. It eliminates one stumbling block in the transportation negotiations, but there are other issues to resolve.

Update II: Paul Nardo, on the Speaker’s staff, says the House did not “cave” but made a tactical concession to keep the negotiations moving, while preserving core budgetary goals. For priorities, click on “comments” and scroll to the third comment.

While the MSM cyclops focuses its monomoniacal eye on the absolute level of transportation funding — will legislators raise another $1.2 billion a year, or only $1 billion — quiet progress is being made in other areas: in particular, the prioritization of funding.

As Peter Galuszka reports for the Road to Ruin project, there is increasing support for creating performance standards for roads — comparable in ways to the Standards of Learning for schools. These standards would measure outputs, not inputs: rating transportation projects on the extent to which they contribute to key goals like safety, congestion mitigation and economic development.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has already appointed, by executive order, a transportation accountability commission to recommend performance standards. And House Bill 3202, the GOP compromise bill, also contains language that would create a Joint Commission on Transportation Accountability to do much the same thing. Ideally, the two groups would work together, not squabble over differing definitions and standards.

The metrics have yet to be devised, although Kaine’s group has already started the process, having held its first meeting. Over and above the safety guidelines, which are well established, metrics might include traffic congestion mitigated per dollar spent, or contribution to economic development. By “economic development,” backers of this concept are not envisioning earmark projects like the $50 million interchange in Stafford County built to improve access to a little-used regional airport. That’s precisely the kind of low-return “investment” they want to prevent. Instead, economic development metrics might measure how a new road would increase the accessibility of labor to a major employment center like Tysons Corner.

Setting priorities is critical. Setting the right priorities is even more critical. This represents an excellent opportunity to align transportation with land use planning. It’s also an opportunity for the state, for once, to stimulate in-fill and re-development in Virginia’s urban core and aging suburbs instead of pushing growth ever farther into the countryside. It could even become a tool one day for building transportation systems that serve Balanced Communities.

There’s one issue that we did not have a chance to explore: the extent to which new priorities driven by new metrics actually would change current spending patterns. Virginia’s road allocation formula is fairly rigid, parceling out funds on the basis of antiquated highway districts boundaries, drawn in the 1920s, and between road classifications that haven’t been updated in almost as long. HB 3202 would require the Virginia Department of Transportation to reclassify roads, but I’m not aware of any measure that would redraw VDOT district boundaries.

Meaningful reform may require more than setting new standards: It may require tearing up the old road funding formula and starting over.

Market pricing is coming to roads and parking sooner rather than later. Virginia can be in the forefront of the trend, or it can get left in the dust. As General Assembly conferees consider their quasi-socialist approach to building and maintaining roads — raising new revenues from every source but those who actually use the roads, and providing access for “free” — they need to recognize that the technology and theory behind market pricing continues to gain credibility around the world.

The latest point of reference: a mini-white paper written by Bern Grush, founder of Skymeter Corporation, of Toronto, Canada. Grush advocates the concept of Road User Charging, which combines a number of features: (1) road pricing, essentially a charge for vehicle-miles driven, as a substitute for the gasoline tax, (2) congesting pricing, a mechanism to cope with traffic congestion, and (3) parking demand management. It’s the ultimate user pays system, and it’s on the cusp of commercial feasibility thanks to satellite and wireless technologies.

Grush is a thought leader in this space. The challenge of his start-up company is to persuade someone to invest in its untested technology and to pioneer its untested theories. Selling to government requires a frustratingly long sales cycle. But Skymeter has raised one round of angel financing, and it expects to close another round, according to an article in the Toronto Star. Although Grush has articulated the possibilities provided by the emerging technology better than anyone I’ve read, he’s not alone. The success of congestion pricing in Singapore, London and Stockholm are attracting attention around the world.

It’s a travesty that, in a state that prides itself as home to a world-class Information Technology industry, the General Assembly seeks to devise a “stable, long-term source of transportation funding” without giving serious consideration to the latest and greatest information technology and theory. One is tempted to blame the politicians for their small, parochial minds, but the responsibility goes deeper. Politicians draw from those around them — the newspapers they read, the television shows they watch, the conferences they attend, the lobbyists they listen to, the academics, businessmen and citizens they interact with. Ultimately, we have only ourselves to blame for our parochial thinking.

It’s bad enough when the Mainstream Media imposes a simplistic meta-narrative on the transportation debate (See my column, “Transportation Abomination“), but it’s impossible for the reading public to understand the issues when a daily newspaper as important as the Richmond Times-Dispatch provides misleading coverage like the article that Michael Hardy and Jeff Schapiro wrote today.

The thrust of the story is that support is building among the 12 Senate and House conferees for a transportation plan that looks a lot more like the House version than the Senate version. Here’s how the story starts:

Road plan support builds
Committee leaning toward the anti-tax House version of bill

by Michael Hardy and Jeff E. Schapiro

The compromise on new money for transportation might not be much of one after all.

With most of the 12 negotiators siding with the anti-tax House on roads and rail, legislators are anticipating an up-or-down vote on a plan that relies on $2 billion in borrowing and diverts substantial tax dollars from education, law enforcement and human services.

The anti-tax House? The supposedly anti-tax House approved a transportation funding plan that called for the following statewide fines, fees and taxes: (1) abusive driver penalties, $61 million; (2) diesel fuel tax, $20 million; overweight trucks penalties, $30 million; vehicle registration fee, $71 million. Additionally, the House approved packages of taxes that would allow Northern Virginians to increase regional taxes, levies and fees by $383 million a year and Hampton Roadsters by $209 million. My calculator says that adds up to $774 million in new fees, fines and levies. (Important caveat: Those numbers come from the bill as submitted. It may have been modified along the way. Regardless, those are numbers that the “anti-tax” House approved at least at one point.)

Admittedly, the imposition of new taxes is smaller than what the Senate is calling for, but it’s not what any honest person would call “anti-tax.” Interestingly, Hardy and Schapiro never apply the moniker “pro-tax” to factions in the General Assembly that want to raise taxes even more, even though such a descriptor would be more in concert with the facts.

As for the snarky comment that the compromise for transportation “might not be much of one after all,” it omits the fact that House/Senate GOP package already represents a compromise of factions that hardly see eye-to-eye.

Hardy and Schapiro compound their “anti-tax” label with their trope that the GOP compromise plan would “divert substantial tax dollars from education, law enforcement and human services” — a characterization right out of the Democratic Party talking points. In fact, the GOP would take money from the General Fund surplus, not monies allocated to existing programs, which have been lavished with increases in the 15 to 20 percent range this biennial budget — context that also goes AWOL in their articles. Only in the sense that the surplus funds could have been spent on schools and human services programs, launching their funding into hyper-drive, instead of, oh, say, returning money to taxpayers, could it be said that the GOP tax plan would “divert” anything.

The GOP tax plan is awful — I’ve characterized it as the Transportation Abomination — and I think it deserves to be defeated. But at least I characterize the contents of it accurately. I don’t portray the package as something that it isn’t. I also make my biases plain for all to see. The T-D newsroom still pretends to be objective.

I have been much dissatisfied with the coverage that the Mainstream Media has given the transportation debate. Reporters and editorial writers alike have employed a primitive analytical framework for understanding the issues. By and large, the MSM has depicted the debate as taking place between “Democrats” and “moderate” Republicans on the one hand and “hard core”, “anti-tax”, “obstructionist” Republicans on the other.

As I write in my latest column, “Transportation Abomination” (stealing the headline from a previous blog entry), this schema is largely useless, if not outright misleading. It is absurd to call Sen. John Chichester, R-Northumberland, a “moderate” when he has advocated tax increases that even Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and former Gov. Mark R. Warner, both Democrats, were unwilling to embrace.

A more useful continuum, I suggest, is between the Big Government party and the Small Government party. The Big Government party consists mainly of Democrats, while the Small Government party consists mainly of Republicans, but there are plenty of exceptions in both camps. Insofar as Sen. Chichester and Sen. Russell Potts, R-Winchester, and others consistently support an expansion in the size, scope and funding of state government, they have far more in common with Democrats of like mind than most Republicans. These gentlemen may have sentimental ties to the GOP, but it is their commitment to Big Government that defines them, not their commitment to the Republican Party.

But that’s only part of the story. When it comes to transportation, there’s another continuum that cuts across party lines: a spectrum that runs from Business As Usual (the vested interests who buttress the status quo) to the Reformers (those who insist that institutional change must be part of any comprehensive transportation solution).

Along this continuum, Sen. Chichester has plenty of company among legislators who like things just the way they are: There’s nothing wrong with the transportation that more money won’t fix. Moving towards the middle is Gov. Kaine, who acknowledges that we can’t “build our way out of congestion,” but isn’t willing to spend much political capital in achieving institutional reform. Moving further along the spectrum is House Speaker William J. Howell, who has proposed restructuring the way the state and local governments build and maintain roads, and took considerable political risks to push his vision. At the far end of the continuum are the Smart Growth movement, free marketeers and others who, to varying degrees, call for a total overhaul Virginia’s zoning codes, land use policies and governance structures.

There is almost no overlap whatsoever between the Reform/Business As Usual polarity and the Democratic/Republican polarity. Indeed, members of both parties include both zealous defenders of, and critics of, the status quo.

In my column, I interpret the transportation debate as an interplay between Democrats and Republicans seeking partisan political advantage, between advocates of Big Government and Small Government in a battle over the size and scope of state government, and between various constituencies either defending or attacking the status quo.

Frankly, I did not have the time to carry through this line of thought as thoroughly as I would have liked. But it considerably more helpful, in my humble opinion, in understanding how Virginia has gotten to where it is — with a handful of General Assembly conferees trying to cobble together a legislative package before the session expires — than you’ll read anywhere in the MSM.