Bacon's Rebellion

Poor Bill Howell. My heart goes out to him. He showed true leadership and resolve in fashioning the GOP transportation package and then putting his prestige on the line to get it passed. To make the deal work with members of the Senate, the Speaker of the House swallowed a number of undesirable elements, such as state and regional tax increases, that he undoubtedly found personally distasteful. Such is the nature of compromise.

But there is a difference between compromise and capitulation. Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee deleted $250 million a year from General Fund surpluses from the GOP compromise and replaced them with more than $330 million a year through $150 fees on newly registered vehicles. That would come on top of all the increases in state and regional taxes in the compromise proposal.

It’s conceivable that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine will emerge as a force in the debate and attempt to broker another compromise, but he’s shown little inclination to do so to this point, and the intransigence of Sen. John H. Chichester and his allies in the Senate suggest that there isn’t much room for negotiation anyway. Chichester, it appears, either wants it all or nothing at all. And nothing is what he might well get.

Which is just as well. The tax-and-financing aspects of the GOP transportation package were horrendous to begin with; Chichester’s add-ons would make it even more insufferable. The best thing that could happen now is for the whole edifice to collapse. To keep the 2007 session of the General Assembly from being a complete loss, perhaps Howell can still salvage the less controversial pieces of the compromise such as the bills that reform the way Virginia builds and maintains its roads.

Otherwise, it’s clear that the political system is gridlocked over transportation taxes. Maybe it’s time to take the issue to the voters and see what they have to say. Howell’s effort at compromise does make one thing very plain: We know who the real “obstructionists” are. Reporters can paint Chichester and his allies as the “moderates” in a battle against the anti-tax “die-hards” all they want, but there is no way to spin the story to make it look like Chichester compromised and Howell didn’t. The Howell faction of the Republican Party has inoculated itself against accusations of intransigence. The Axis of Taxes now looks like the ultras.

Let’s see what happens in the GOP primaries this spring. Will the rank and file be enraged enough to throw out the proponents of Business As Usual? Let’s see what happens in the general elections this fall. How eager will voters be to boost their state and regional tax burdens after the inevitable round of property tax hikes this spring? The results could be clarifying.

I know Jim is a fan of congestion pricing, and even believes it may hold some hope of changing the transportation landscape in far-flung portions of the state.

But then there is a this cautionary tale out of London, where congestion pricing has been in place for some time. The results aren’t exactly pretty:

Motorists in London have paid more than £677 million since the introduction of the congestion charge in 2003 — but only a fraction of this has been invested in other transport projects.

And with Ken Livingstone, the capital’s mayor, planning to extend the zone west into Kensington and Chelsea, opposition politicians claim much of the revenue has been swallowed up in the cost of running the scheme.

According to the Greater London Authority’s own figures, the bill for the congestion charge is rising above the rate of inflation, from £120.8 million two years ago to £143.5 million last year.

However, setting up the scheme cost an estimated £161.7 million and it is now believed that motorists will have to help find the £103 million to extend it to the West.

The London experience will in crease public doubts concerning road pricing. To add to the controversy it has emerged that a large slice of the income made by Transport for London comes not from motorists who pay the charge, but from fines on those who don’t.

While London’s experience does not necessarily mean the concept of congestion pricing should be abandoned, it does tell me that before such a scheme is tried here, far more needs to be done to ensure that the sort of “budget creep” London is facing isn’t repeated.

Sooner or later it was bound to happen: The Washington Post has run an editorial that I agree with. Rest assured, I haven’t gone soft and mushy — it’s the Post that has seen the light.

Buried in the latest White House budget, writes the Post, is a proposal to grant $100 million to as-yet-unspecified cities to experiment with value pricing as a strategy for combatting traffic congestion. The Post, which has plugged tirelessly for more construction and higher taxes in Virginia, sees merit in a strategy that would modulate the demand side of the equation:

Traffic jams cost millions of Americans real money, an expense that is disguised in the form of lost time and wasted gas, not to mention the daily frustration that’s harder to price or otherwise quantify. The White House estimates that in 2003 American motorists in the 85 most-clogged metropolitan areas wasted 3.7 billion hours and 2.3 billion gallons of gasoline — about $63 billion worth — stuck in traffic. Every year, drivers in the 10 most-congested cities pay between $850 and $1,600 and use the equivalent of about eight work days on jammed highways and streets. These calculations do not even consider the massive social cost of additional air pollution. The Washington area is one of the worst-off: The Census Bureau announced last year that, on average, commuters in and around the District have the second-longest trips in the country.

Urban congestion has become so bad that, in addition to investing in public transportation and traffic-calming strategies, many cities are considering ways of making these disguised costs explicit — by, for example, charging a toll when drivers enter certain parts of towns or use particularly popular highways during peak hours — thereby discouraging unnecessary trips when congestion is at its worst.

It’s scary when I find myself agreeing with a Post editorial. There must be some significance to this harmonic convergence of such divergent philosophies. Perhaps it’s a sign that the time for congestion pricing has truly come. Now… if only we could persuade the lawmakers trapped inside the bubble of the General Assembly to halt their bickering over which taxes to raise and start thinking about how to institute congestion pricing.

A key to the House transportation compromise is legislation that would create transportation authorities in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads and allow them to raise revenues to fund regional road projects. Hampton Roads would have power to impose tolls highways, increase vehicle registration and inspection fees, and boost the commercial real estate tax — and slap a $5-per-night fee on hotels rooms.

As Tom Holden with the Virginian-Pilot reports, a Hampton Roads transportation authority would require support from at least six of the 11 Hampton Roads cities or counties. A letter from Virginia Beach Mayor Meyera Oberndorf to the region’s General Assembly delegation suggests that the region’s most populous localities has doubts about the plan.

The tax, said Oberndorf, would have “an exceptionally negative effect on our ability to compete for conventions.”

Del. Kenny Melvin, D-Portsmouth, who voted against the House compromise last week, suggested that the regional financing plan was doomed even if passed into law. “I don’t believe there are six jurisdictions that will buy into this package.”

Update: Of course, there are local Republicans in Northern Virginia raising hell, too. Marc Fisher with the Washington Post interviews Corey Stewart, the new chairman of the Prince William County board of supervisors, who is mad as hell at statewide Republicans and isn’t going to take it anymore. Other than orchestrating a moratorium on rezonings and trying to pry a larger share of state transportation revenues out of Richmond, he doesn’t offer any solutions that address underlying problems — at least none that appear in Fisher’s column.

Legislative maneuvering in the General Assembly reached a theatric climax earlier this month when Sen. Russell Potts, R-Winchester, withdrew a transportation-tax proposal that threatened to derail the comprehensive GOP transportation package supported by the House of Delegates and elements of the state Senate. Newspaper accounts alluded only briefly to Potts’ explanation for his retraction: the fact that Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling was prepared to rule that his amendment was not “germane” to the underlying legislation.

Potts’ retreat represented a decisive defeat not only for the Winchester maverick but for Senate Finance Chair John H. Chichester, R-Northumberland, and his allies in the Axis of Taxes who see higher taxes and more spending as the best antidotes to what ails the Commonwealth. Remarkably, no one in the press corps, which normally loves high drama, never felt moved to delve behind the scenes of this legislative turning point.

A few new details have emerged from Bolling himself, who wrote about the incident in his weekly newsletter, “The Bolling Report.” In this week’s edition he writes:

The Chichester/Potts bill set up a potentially divisive battle with Chichester, Potts and Senate Democrats on one side and the vast majority of Senate Republicans on the other side. At the last minute Senator Chichester and Senator Potts asked that their alternative transportation proposal be returned to the Committee on Finance and not voted on by the full Senate.

The decision to forgo a floor fight on this issue appeared to be influenced by two factors: 1) a desire to avoid a potentially bitter battle between Senate Republicans, who have historically stood united on important issues such as this, and 2) a desire to avoid an adverse parliamentary ruling that could have prevented the bill from moving forward.

At issue was whether or not the Chichester/Potts substitute was “germane” to the underlying bill it was attached to by the Committee on Finance. Germaneness is an important parliamentary principle which requires that committee amendments relate to the general purpose of the underlying bill and that they do not unreasonably expand the general purpose of the underlying bill.

In this case the Committee on Finance had added the Chichester/Potts substitute to an underlying bill introduced by Senator Potts that was much narrower in its focus than the committee substitute. Because of this, I had been asked, as the presiding officer of the Senate, to determine if the committee substitute was germane.

After completing extensive research on this question I had decided that the Chichester/Potts substitute was not germane to the underlying bill it was attached to. As such, I was prepared to rule that the substitute was not properly before the Senate and order its return to the Committee on Finance.

To avoid this ruling, and to avoid a bitter floor fight among Senate Republicans, Senator Chichester and Senator Potts chose to voluntarily recommit their substitute to the Committee on Finance. The good news is that a vote on the Chichester/Potts substitute, which would have seriously harmed our efforts to reach any agreement on transportation funding this year, was avoided.

As of this morning, Bolling was making no predictions as to whether the full Senate would approve the compromise package.

There is some interesting data presented in “The State of Transportation in Hampton Roads,” published by the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission. I doubt that the author, Dwight L. Farmer, draws the same conclusions from the data as I do — the PDF file I extract these charts from doesn’t contain any commentary — but that’s the beauty of raw data. It can be interpreted in many ways.

Let’s start with a chart that shows how the total number of Vehicle Miles Driven between 1996 and 2005 in Hampton Roads has outpaced the growth in population and the number of licensed drivers.

What could account for such a dramatic increase? Well, let’s look at people’s commuting habits.

This chart shows a continuation in recent years of a long-term trend of people driving to work in locations outside the localities where they live. Translation: Instead of living in compact urban areas with a balance of housing and jobs, an increasing percentage of Hampton Roads residents have been living in bedroom communities and driving longer distances to job centers closer to the urban core.

Why are Hampton Roads residents living in bedroom communities? Because they enjoy driving longer distances? Of course not. They’re living in bedroom communities because that’s where the bulk of new housing is being built.

There’s one more factor at work: More Hampton Roadsters are driving solo, while a smaller percentage are walking, biking, carpooling, riding buses or –and this surprises me — working at home.

There are two reasons for the increasing number of solo drivers. The first is prosperity: More households can afford to buy and maintain cars for every licensed driver in the family. Prosperity is a good thing. The other reason, however, is not. New development is increasingly scattered, disconnected and low-density, which effectively precludes walking, biking and mass transit as transportation options. In other words, people are forced to drive automobiles because the prevailing pattern of land use reduces their transportation options.

There is one sliver of potentially good news. The rate of increase in VMT has slowed since 1999 and plateaued for the most recent two years measured. Given the increase in gasoline prices in 2005 and 2006, it’s possible that VMT might have actually declined in 2006.

Are there forces at work that could be reversing the remorseless increase in VMT? Are human settlement patterns changing in Hampton Roads in ways that we don’t fully appreciate? Are jobs migrating away from the urban core along with housing? Does the aging of the population and increasing number of retirees mean that a growing percentage of the population actually is driving less?

More to the point, if VMT is leveling off, is the transportation “crisis” in Hampton Roads being overblown? Stay tuned. We’ll have to see what story the 2006 data tell us.

(Hat tip to Reid Greenbaum for bringing this document to my attention.)

Local governments in Virginia say they can handle the stresses and strains of growth: just give them the power to ban growth where roads and schools are crowded. Sounds reasonable. Until you look at what’s happening in Maryland’s Washington suburbs.

That’s what Alec MacGillis with the Washington Post has done. And the results aren’t always pretty. Writes MacGillis:

Here is what that method has accomplished in Anne Arundel County: More than one-third of its school districts are closed to new subdivisions, even in areas intended to absorb construction under the state’s much-touted “slow-growth” laws. As a result, development is being pushed to more rural parts of the state less suited to handle it.

The shortcomings of Maryland’s growth policies are just one sign of what frustrated officials are finding in both [Maryland and Virginia] — that controlling development is not as easy as just saying no. Three months after voters in the D.C. suburbs elected candidates who vowed to slow growth, reform proposals are floundering amid political inertia and resistance from developers.

If you halt growth here, it will move over there. The trouble is, “there” is usually some outlying district or county farther from the center-weighted location of jobs in the metropolitan area. Stopping growth might alleviate localized congestion — temporarily — but it makes regional congestion worse. As people move farther from the core in search of housing, they clog the Interstates and freeways for greater distances, putting even greater strain on the transportation system than they would otherwise.

Blocking development in the fast-growth counties could conceivably avoid this problem if there were more in-fill and re-development projects closer to the urban core. But rampant NIMBYism in established neighborhoods, buttressed by local zoning codes and comprehensive plans, limits the number of such new projects to a trickle. The solution to Virginia’s infrastructure woes is not giving fast-growth governments more power to abuse. It’s re-restructuring our governance systems, tax codes and zoning codes.

Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle, R-Virginia Beach, and Sen. Thomas K. Norment, Jr., R-Williamsburg, both work for the Norfolk law firm, Kaufman and Canoles. According to Roanoke attorney David Nixon, both men, who are powerhouses in the state Senate, represent public utilities and government clients who use the power of eminent domain to take property from private citizens and business owners. If they have a vested interest against bills that would curtail the rights of their clients to condemn land, should they be allowed to vote on those bills?

Nixon thinks not. He filed ethics complaints yesterday alleging a conflict of interest, arguing that both men “used their positions and influence … to get themselves appointed to the Eminent Domain subcommittee, where meaningful eminent domain reform legislation is buried year after year.” Eminent domain has been a particularly contentious issue since the Kelo ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which expanded the rights of local governments to condemn land for public purposes.

Nixon contends that “K&C clients could easily construe K&C’s website as promising that the Senators will use their influence in the General Assembly to advance the interests of their clients.”

Here’s how Stolle’s profile reads on the K&C website:

For Kaufman & Canoles, Ken works closely with colleague Tommy Norment — the Senate Majority Leader — in presenting the firm to prospective corporate and governmental clients. He has, over his years in the Senate, developed a vast knowledge of state government and a network of business, government, and law enforcement leaders who respect him and his work.

In addition, he’s experienced in civil, criminal, and administrative litigation as well as in business law, particularly for the hospitality industry. This combination of political know-how, business acumen, and personal relationships, boosts Ken’s value to his clients. Says Ken, simply: “We have the ability to make things happen.”

I am not familiar enough with the General Assembly’s conflict-of-interest guidelines to know if Nixon’s charge has any merit. However, I do not read into the wording of Stolle’s profile what Nixon reads into it. The profile says that Stolle would use his “political know-how, business acument and personal relationships” but that’s a far cry from saying he would influence legislation. The potential for abuse certainly exists, but that’s true for any lawyer-legislator.

Nixon presents no solid evidence in his press release for his charge that Stolle and Norment used their influence to kill eminent domain legislation. They may have, for all I know, but Nixon doesn’t spell it out in his press release. I’m trying to get the details of his complaint. If he offers any substantive evidence, I’ll update the blog.

Update: Here is the Norment complaint and the Stolle complaint.