Bacon's Rebellion

The transportation-land use connection is finally getting debated.

Although Gov. Timothy M. Kaine had made transportation/land use an issue in his gubernatorial campaign, it never got more than token coverage by the scribblers in the Mainstream Media who decide how debates are framed and presented to the public. When the House GOP leadership tried raising the issue again in the September special session, their package of land use reforms — arguably the most far-reaching changes to the state governance structure since the 1930s — got about as much ink as a proclamation honoring the ladies’ auxiliary of the Chatham volunteer rescue squad.

This time around, the House initiative is generating headlines. Although much of the attention is predictably negative, at least voters are aware that an alternative does exist to the state-run, tax-and-build policies of the past 70 years.

The most balanced coverage comes courtesy of Corey Byers and Meghann Cotter at the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star. That article, which gives equal time to the authors of the House legislation and to local government critics, raises the key issue: Can local governments do a better job of planning for and maintaining local roads than the state can? The Free Lance-Star quotes House Speaker William J. Howell:

We think local governments can probably do as good a job, if not better, maintaining secondary roads. … Answering the problem of transportation is broader than raising taxes and giving the money to VDOT. The prime culprit is increasing sprawl.

Local government officials in the Fredericksburg area responded fairly predictably: The problem isn’t local land use policies — or if it is, it was zoning decisions made years ago. The solution isn’t structural reform, it’s more money from the state.

Agree with whom you want to — at least we’re getting a debate.

As predictable as the reaction of local officials was the negative reaction of pundits at the Roanoke Times and the Washington Post.

The Times editorialist does credit House leaders with raising a legitimate issue even if, in the final analysis, he thinks they are wrong-headed about taxes: “Their proposals to tie local land-use decisions to transportation costs put smart-growth ideas on the state agenda for the first time in a serious way, challenging powerful development lobbies. The shift in priorities is years overdue.”

The Times‘ concern is that the House initiative shifts “blame” for the transportation crisis from where it really belongs — the House refusal to raise more stable, long-term revenues for transportation, or to augment the powers of local governments to block development along the lines that Gov. Kaine has proposed. You can agree or disagree with the Times analysis, but at least the editorial writers are tentatively exploring new ground and not re-hashing the same editorials of the past three years.

Then there’s the Washington Post, which, in a self-parody of knee-jerk, tax-and-spend liberalism, makes the editorial writers at the small-metro Roanoke Times look profound and nuanced by comparison. In a spittle-flecked screed that barely deserves the honorific of “editorial,” the Post devotes some 650 words blasting the House legislation without ever describing what it would do.

“Don’t be fooled,” cautions the WaPo editorial headline, “Virginia Republicans are the ones starving the state’s transportation network.”

Don’t be fooled by what? The Post never says. The closest the editorial comes to summarizing House transportation policy is to note that it would spend half the state’s budget surplus, $500 million, on one-time transportation projects. The Post mentioned not one word –not one word — of House plans to devolve more responsibility for road planning and maintenance to local governments. The editorial is not merely one-sided, it is so one-sided as to be deceptive. Perhaps worse, it is ignorant. The wine-and-brie yokels at the Post are either so close minded or so uninformed that they aren’t aware that alternative viewpoints even exist.

Fortunately, Northern Virginia residents don’t have to rely upon whacko WaPo editorial writers for their information. One way or another, new perspectives on the transportation debate are leaking into the public domain.

The flip side of “smart growth” is “smart shrinkage.”

USA Today examines how the city of Richmond is dealing with its declining population: downsizing gracefully, as it were. Following the lead of hundreds of European cities, where populations are shrinking, many American cities are reinventing themselves as well.

“Everybody’s talking about smart growth, but nobody is talking about smart decline,” says Terry Schwarz, senior planner at Kent State University’s Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio. The center runs the Shrinking Cities Institute in Cleveland, a city that has lost more than half its population since 1950. “There’s nothing that says that a city that has fewer people in it has to be a bad place.”

It’s a startling admission in a nation that has always equated growth with success. Cities are downsizing by returning abandoned neighborhoods to nature and pulling the plug on expensive services to unpopulated areas. Some have stopped pumping water, running sewer lines and repaving roads in depopulated neighborhoods. They’re turning decimated areas into parks, wildlife refuges or bike trails. They’re tearing down homes no one is living in and concentrating development where people want to move.

The problem of shrinking city populations in the United States is not as acute as in Europe, where fertility rates have plummeted nationally and immigration has been limited. But household sizes are getting smaller in the U.S., meaning that even cities with the same number of households support a population. USA Today portrays the City of Richmond as a city that is handling the transition well.

Money quote from Greg Wingfield with the Greater Richmond Partnership:

The city wants to grow, but it’s not waiting for a population boom, says Greg Wingfield, president and CEO of Greater Richmond Partnership Inc., an economic development marketing group. “We don’t as a region aspire to be the next Atlanta or the next Charlotte,” he says. “It’s about quality. It’s not about growing for the sake of growing.”

As Virginia evolves toward a Knowledge-based wealth creation system, we need to take a fresh look at state-level energy policy. As Alvin and Heidi Toffler observe in their book, “Revolutionary Wealth,” America’s energy economy has not adapted as quickly as dynamic sectors of the economy.

Industrial America was built on the back of cheap fossil fuels and an immense infrastructure for distributing energy around the country. Costly and overdependent on imported oil and gas, the American energy-distribution system includes 159,000 miles of electrical-transmission lines and 2 million miles of oil pipelines that, because they are heavy fixed assets, are hard to alter in response to rapid change.

The United States is rushing to build an advanced knowledge-based economy but remains saddled with an industrial-age, legacy energy system politically defended by some of the world’s biggest and most influential corporations against a growing, growling public demand for fundamental change in the system. The conflict is not usually posed in these terms, but it is, in fact, an example of Second Wave vs. Third Wave warfare.

Unfortunately, the Tofflers provide even fewer specifics about a “Third Wave” energy sector than they do about the “Third Wave” transportation sector, so it is not clear what they have in mind. Allow me to hazard a few guesses.

A Third Wave, knowledge-based energy economy would, first and foremost, consume energy far more efficiently than we do today. Secondly, it would be more decentralized than the system we have today.

We would see more “distributed generation,” relying less upon giant power plants connected by gargantuan power transmission lines and more upon local, small-scale power generators and energy sources. We would see more “smart” meters that allow consumers to track their electric consumption minute by minute, not month by month. We would see rate structures that reward consumers for conserving energy or for shifting consumption to off-peak periods of the day and off-peak seasons. Similarly, we would see rate structures that require businesses and homeowners to pay their full locational costs — if it costs more to supply energy to a certain location, they would pay more.

A Third Wave energy economy would support the research of promising new technologies and remove barriers to the use of “green” fuels such as solar, wind and bio-fuels (but it would allow market mechanisms to dictate the pace at which such technologies were adopted).

A Third Wave energy economy would seek not only to develop more gasoline-efficient automobiles but would encourage Virginians to drive less by developing more energy-efficient human settlement patterns — i.e. human settlement patterns that would allow people to fulfill their needs with fewer and shorter automobile trips.

I’ve culled these quotes from the articles filed today about the House land use-reform initiative.

From the Washington Post:

Speaking in blunt terms, House leaders said an eagerness by local officials to approve development was “an abdication of responsibility” to plan for the impact on traffic, and that supervisors in growing counties “have done a less-than-stellar job” in planning for the future.

“The easiest job in the world is to be a supervisor approving subdivisions,” said Del. C.L. “Clay” Athey Jr. (R-Warren), who leads the House GOP effort to design land-use legislation. “You can approve it, and as soon as it’s over and done with, you can say any impacts to the roads you don’t have to consider at all and you can just start blaming the state.” …

County supervisors, Democrats and Republicans alike, reacted angrily to the accusation that their planning decisions are why the state’s roads are such a mess.

“It just shows how desperate they are to find somebody to blame rather than themselves,” said Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald E. Connolly (D), who was singled out by name during the news conference. “This is all yet another attempt to sidetrack the public discussion from their unwillingness to put any new money on the table for transportation infrastructure.” …

Kaine spokesman Kevin Hall said Wednesday that the governor and House Republicans are “generally rowing in the same direction” in regard to the newly proposed legislation. But Hall cautioned that the governor had not seen any specifics.

From the Virginian-Pilot:

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said he welcomed the Republican ideas and would introduce his own growth-control bills during the session. “I think it’s an area where there’s a lot of common ground,” Kaine said. “I think that they’re looking at it in a smart way.”

From the Times-Dispatch:

“We are pleased to know that issues of transportation reform and land-use planning are being recognized as top priorities,” said Lisa Guthrie, executive director of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters. “Both polling and recent elections show growth management and transportation reform to be critical issues for Virginians.”

House Republicans have re-introduced land use-reform legislation they submitted during the ill-fated September special session of the General Assembly. The three-bill package is sure to generate controversy among home builders and local governments, but preliminary indications are that the proposals will have a lot more traction this time around.

Critical differences in the political environment: (1) Gov. Timothy M. Kaine indicated that he approved of the general thrust of the package even though he was planning his own legislative priorities; (2) Representatives of the environmental/conservation community applauded the House leadership for “proposing reforms that advance efforts to adopt successful, long-term solutions to our sprawl and traffic problems”; and (3) the capitol press corps acknowledged the existence of the legislation with full-length feature articles instead of relegating the bills to throw-away paragraphs buried deep in their stories.

The aim of the legislation is to tame “suburban sprawl” — the scattered, disconnected, low-density development patterns implicated in aggravating traffic congestion. As Del. Clifford Athey, R-Front Royal, one of the key architects of the package, put it: “Our existing laws in this area were adopted during the Great Depression. They aren’t just woefully outdated, they’re truly obsolete. For localities dealing with rapid residential growth and sprawl, this comprehensive and forward-looking plan is the most significant advance since zoning became commonplace over 40 years ago.”

The House hand-out summarizing the legislation frames this issue this way:

Transportation cannot be addressed and its challenges cannot be solved if we continue to adhere to the outdated approach of just three elements: Tax. Spend. Build. … Any legislative plan to improve transportation that ignores one of the root causes of clogged roads and highways – Virginia’s 70-plus-year-old government land use policies – is inherently inadequate, shortsighted and flawed.

The legislation has three main parts:

• Require counties to create urban development areas large enough to accommodate 20 years of population growth. These areas would incorporate principles of New Urbanism design to include “open space, mass transit, walking trails, denser development and a commercially zoned component – reducing the need to use the transportation system.”
• Invite counties to participate in pilot projects to take over responsibility for secondary roads within urban transportation service districts. As financial inducement, the state would give counties a share of state revenue and allow them to impose impact fees on development.
• Require the Virginia Department of Transportation to define “neighborhood” roads and then prohibit the state from accepting any more such roads into the state system for maintenance purposes. Either counties or homeowners associations would have to take over responsibility for maintaining the roads.

Bacon’s Rebellion has described the logic behind the original versions of these bills in previous columns. They include:

Seventy-Five Years. Virginia’s system for building and maintaining roads has changed little in three quarters of a century. Some people think it needs more money. Others think it needs an overhaul.

The Devolution Solution. Any meaningful transportation reform would make fast-growth counties responsible for their secondary roads. The trick is coaxing them into going along.

Focused Growth. To tame scattered development and the ills it creates, Frederick County concentrates growth in an Urban Development Area. The idea works so well that House Republicans want to take it statewide.

(Please note: The authors of the three bills may have changed aspects of the legislation since September. My columns do not provide an up-to-date explanation of what the current bills would do. The articles do provide history and background to help you understand what they are designed to accomplish.)

As a follow-up to my previous post, “Virginia, the De-Synchronization of Change and Fundamental Change,” I thought it useful to recapitulate what Alvin and Heidi Toffler have to say about the American transportation system. A vast infrastructure of four million miles of public highways, roads and streets, 23 million commercial trucks and hundreds of millions of automobiles, they write, “was a response to the mass society that grew up with mass production, urbanization and work patterns that required masses of workers to commute back and forth over the same pathways on uniform schedules.”

In 2000, the Tofflers note, some 119 million Americans wasted 24 billion hours getting to and from their jobs. But as mass production gives way to “increasingly customized, de-massified and decentralized knowledge production, large numbers of people no longer work in city cores. Work patterns shift from fixed schedules to anytime, anyplace, including home … altering the way time and space are used.”

The Tofflers look to “intelligent transportation” as a Knowledge-wave solution. The U.S. Department of Transportation concludes that intelligent “freeway management systems” could reduce accidents by 17 percent while permitting highways to handle 22 percent more traffic at greater speeds. Likewise, computerizing traffic signals could decrease travel times by 14 percent and delays by 37 percent.

Here’s where their analysis gets juicy:

But pressure from pour-more-concrete lobbies greatly outmatch the political influence of the nascent information-technology sector. When President Clinton in 1998 signed an act allocating $203 billion for repairing and “building roads, bridges, transit systems and railways,” the amount set aside for intelligent systems was approximately one tenth of 1 percent — this from an administration that touted its support for the “information superhighway.”

The U.S. transportation system, on which most business enterprises directly or indirectly depend, is still gridlocked by a political powerful triad of oil companies, car manufacturers and often corrupted highway-construction firms. … The key elements of America’s infrastructure – and their component subsystems — are de-synchronized and fought over by vested industrial-era interests and breakthrough innovators advancing the knowledge-based wealth system. Wave conflict again.

Virginia, one would think, possesses a IT industry with sufficient mass and political clout to nudge the Commonwealth’s transportation system in the knowledge-intensive direction espoused by the Tofflers. Sadly, Virginia’s tech lobby has functioned as a cheer-leader for the solutions advocated by the “pour-more-concrete lobby,” committing a miniscule amount of its political clout to pushing IT-oriented solutions. “Breakthrough innovators” do exist in Virginia, but they are small, politically powerless and largely unrepresented by the tech lobbies.

Of course, as the Tofflers fail to recognize, even liberal application of cool IT technology cannot, by itself, solve Virginia’s transportation problems. There simply is no way around the need for fundamental change to human settlement patterns, governance structures and transportation funding mechanisms.

Still, the Tofflers do intuit that the changing relationship between work and the workplace re-shapes the demand for transportation capacity — a subject that I am writing about for other publications and will address here on the Bacon’s Rebellion blog when I can. They also describe accurately how vested interests — not only auto companies, oil companies and highway construction firms but real estate developers and land speculators — have mobilized to thwart reform. While “Revolutionary Wealth” hardly offers the definitive treatise on U.S. transportation solutions, the Tofflers provide a useful context for understanding the problem.

In Arlington County, a team of 38 employees is dedicated to encouraging employers and property managers to promote transit, biking and walking. Fairfax County, with about seven times as many residents, has recently appointed a single person to coordinate the county’s Traffic Demand Management policies. So reports Alec MacGillis in the Washington Post today.

Perhaps that helps explain why Arlington, despite its greater densities, experiences less traffic congestion than Fairfax County. In Traffic Demand Management (TDM), property owners use a variety of tools — pricing and availability of parking spaces, flex cars, van pools, coordination with mass transit, streetscape design, a complementary mix of land uses — to reduce automobile traffic. As Arlington has demonstrated, effective TDM programs can ameliorate a lot of congestion.

One reason that TDM works in Arlington and doesn’t in Fairfax, suggests MacGillis is that Arlington invests resources in its TDM program and Fairfax doesn’t. Another reason is that Fairfax has failed to enforce the agreements it has forged with developers in exchange for increased development densities.

As we’ve argued on this blog for a long time, TDM is potentially a very effective strategy for combatting traffic congestion. TDM is basic. Fairfax County needs to get serious about implementing it.

The State of Virginia and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority are close to signing an agreement that cedes state control over the Rail-to-Dulles project and toll revenues from the Dulles Toll Road to the authority — and Stewart Schwartz wants details.

Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, argues that the turn-over is so important that “the public should have a right to review and comment on the agreement before it is signed.” The MWAA, governed by appointed directors from Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., would become a key player in decisions affecting Virginia transportation and land use decisions.

Said Schwartz: “We have already expressed concern that MWAA might be less likely to support the tunnel for Tysons Corner because their overriding interest is building the connection to the airport as fast as possible. Yet, it is not the airport that will generate the greatest number of riders, but Tysons Corner. The tunnel is the key to both the redesign of this edge city and to achieving the ridership necessary to justify the project.”

Key questions: (1) Will the agreement give MWAA power to direct surplus toll revenues to transportation projects of its choosing? and (2) will the MWAA have control over the granting of air rights development above metro stations?

On the issue of air rights, Schwartz asks: Who will receive revenues from the sale of those air rights? Will local governments and citizens be able to participate in planning for those sites? Will a mechanism exist to consider density transfers to the air rights sectors in return for expanded public spaces?

Schwartz also renewed his call for a competitive bidding of Rail-to-Dulles construction as opposed to a contract negotiated with Dulles Transit Partners, which is associated with engineering-construction giant Bechtel.

(Click here to visit the Coalition’s website. The press release is not yet posted online, but should be shortly.)

Garren Shipley, who covers the General Assembly for the Northern Virginia Daily, demonstrates once again that his dispatches are critical reading, for he covers topics you won’t read in any of the major metro dailies. Today he previews the legislation that the House of Delegates will submit next month to overhaul the relationship between state and local government in the maintenance of and planning for roads. So far, Shipley is the only political reporter to break from the herd and cover transportation as something other than a debate over taxes.

Readers of Bacon’s Rebellion, of course, will find the House proposals familiar. As we wrote earlier this year, the House would (1) mandate urban development areas, (2) create urban transportation service districts, and (3) curtail the admittance of subdivision roads into the state road network.

While my pieces were long and verbose, Shipley provides a quick, readable snapshot of the issues. As Shipley quotes Del. Clay Athey, R-Front Royal, new money for the state’s road system is out of the question unless it comes along with fundamental reform. Said Athey: “Funneling a bunch of additional money into a transportation system that’s broken because of poor local land use policy …. [means] that we’ve wasted our money.”

In their latest work, “Revolutionary Wealth,” Heidi and Alvin Toffler argue that different institutions evolve at different rates of speed as the economy, society, culture and political system shift from an industrial-wave to a knowledge-wave “wealth-creating system.” Businesses are adapting most rapidly — indeed, they are largely driving the shift — followed closely by nongovernmental grass roots organizations. Lagging behind is the American family, and even farther behind are labor unions, government bureaucracies and regulatory agencies. Bringing up the rear: schools, the governance structure and legal institutions. (Doug Koelemay touches upon mismatch between the “demands of the fast-growing new economy and the inertial institutional structure of the old society” in his column, “Future Still Shocking,” which inspired me to read the book.)

In their discussion of the United States, the Tofflers are relatively optimistic. Not only has our economy and society advanced farther down the path to a knowledge-wave wealth-creation system, Americans are more open to change than either the Europeans or Japanese, and they’re less vulnerable to cataclysmic political turmoil than the Chinese. However, there are several dischordances in our institutional mix that stand out — dischordances, as it happens, that are objects of regular scrutiny on this blog: the transportation infastructure, the energy system and the educational system.

The Tofflers make a number of useful observations about each, as I hope to explicate in future posts. As high-altitude observers, integrating global trends, the Tofflers miss some important details. They have little to say about the importance of human settlement patterns, for instance, in understanding the dysfunction of our transportation and energy systems. But their larger points hold up very well.

The old, industrial-wave wealth-creating system is supported by an array of vested interests. These interests resist meaningful change, seeking to apply familiar, but increasingly ineffective, industrial-wave solutions. In essence, they argue for redoubling our efforts in doing the same old thing. We can see this clearly in Virginia in our approach to roads and education: There’s nothing that spending more money can’t fix.

But industrial-wave solutions will not work. Incremental reforms won’t work. We need to reconceptualize crucial institutions. We need to reinvent them from scratch. In other words, to borrow the idiom of Bacon’s Rebellion, we need Fundamental Change.

The Bacon family is heading to the once-great state of West Virginia (“once great” in the sense that it once was part of Virginia) for a little R&R at the Showshoe resort. Last year, there was no Wi-Fi access, so I do not anticipate doing any blogging. Which is just as well. While others in our party go skiing, I will be doing the kind of prolonged and thoughtful reading that I have little time for now.

Right now, I’m finishing up Mark Steyn’s book, “America Alone,” a depressing but impossible-to-ignore treatise on the demographic decline of the secular Western World in the face of a resurgent and fertile/virile Islam. Next on my list is the Toffler’s book, “Revolutionary Wealth,” which, from what I can glean, is a tad more optimistic about the future of the world.

To all my friends and readers, I wish you Merry Christmas — unless you’re offended by my cultural chauvenism, in which case I offer my abject apologies and wish you a happy winter solstice.

New Delhi has had zoning laws banning businesses from residential areas since the 1950s, but they’ve been honored only in the breech. The result, according to Shikha Dalmia, writing in the Wall Street Journal, is that “until now, ordinary citizens arranged their homes, businesses and neighborhoods according to their own private plans. Over the last 50 years, the city has quite spontaneously sorted itself according to an inner logic that no planner could have anticipated, unleashing vast reserves of entrepreneurial energy.”

But New Delhi will host the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and there is concern that the congested, gridlocked tangle of India’s capital city will prove to be an embarrassment. So, India’s Supreme Court has ordered a campaign to close all businesses — potentially affecting 500,000 of them — located in the city’s residential zones. That order has prompted such an outpouring of protest that it has been temporarily suspended.

Here’s how Dalmia describes the mixed use atmosphere of New Delhi (in a description reminiscent of what visitors have told me about Hong Kong, another entrepreneurial marvel):

People with homes on major arteries, for instance, have either opened their own businesses or rented out rooms to accountants, doctors, clothing show-rooms, jewelry stores, beauticians, banquet halls or Internet cafes — you name it. Many of these businesses have totally displaced the original homes, creating thriving, bustling places of commece such as the super-posh makrets in South Extension and MG Road and their less-plush equivalents in Moti Nagar and Kamla Nagar.

But major commercial activity has not been limited along major roads. Every Delhi neighborhood is a self-sufficient entity with its own grocery stores, tailors, dry cleaners and salons — all within safe walking distance for kids to run errands. Some of the more upscale areas such as Defense Colony have about 100 art galleries sandwiched between houses. The freedom to operate from home has been a particular boon for Indian women who are able to run roaring businesses — most of them catering to other women — while keeping an eye on their children. Indeed, residences and businesses have become so intertwined that most people don’t know that a Master Plan forbidding mixed uses exists.

Such “chaos” is anathema to planners, of course. Here in Virginia, we have neatly segregated all of our land uses, separating housing, workplaces, shops and civic buildings, and then relying upon automobiles to make them accessible. Our system works economically as long as there’s enough money to pay for an endless supply of new roads and/or transit projects (which there isn’t), and as long as the price of oil and gasoline remain inexpensive (which it won’t).

It is also interesting to ponder what segregated land uses have done to America’s entrepreneurial vitality: in particular to the ability of women to form micro-enterprises that allow them to work in their houses where they can juggle home-making, money-making and child rearing. One could probe even deeper and inquire into the impact of our human settlement patterns upon our national psyche. Children too young to drive have lost their independence. They cannot reach any meaningful destination in the suburbs without a parent to drive them somewhere. That prolonged dependence is satisfying neither for the children, nor the parents (predominantly the mothers) who never imagined that they would spend so much time as glorified chauffeurs.

Someone please tell the Indians, we Americans have been there. Don’t do it!

(Note to knee-jerks: I am not railing against the automobile. I love automobiles and the freedom of movement they provide. I’m railing against the segregation of land uses which, by forcing spatial separation between different types of activities, makes us overly dependent upon the automobile.)

(Photo credit: Simjen Hendriks photography)

Tom Morris, the secretary of education, has hit the road to build support for Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s universal pre-k child care proposal. In a public forum in Charlottesville city hall, Morris noted that the state has provided a preschool program exclusively for at-risk 4-year-olds since 1995. It has been difficult, however, for the Virginia Preschool Initiative to reach all at-risk children, he said.

As the Daily Progress reports in its coverage of the forum, Kathy Glazer, the director of Kaine’s working group on early childhood initiatives, elaborated: “Those dollars were not fully utilized because there were some barriers that were in place.”

It’s not totally clear from the context of the article what those “barriers” were. However, the Daily Progress quoted Morris as saying that more community groups and business leaders would support an all-inclusive 4-year-old plan. “Public programs for just at-risk students don’t have the broader constituency of support as one that includes all children.”

That may be what Morris said, but that’s not what the debate is about. The Kaine administration message just isn’t getting through. I can’t tell if that’s because the Kaniacs are not articulating it well or if reporters are just failing to follow their logic. But here’s what I picked up from a two-minute chat with Morris at a recent Virginia FREE function:

Yes, Virginia does provide support pre-k programs for “at risk” children, but the problem is bigger than that. Thousands of children of working-class and middle-class households are showing up at kindergarden unprepared as well. With private pre-school tuitions averaging $7,000 a year (a point that was noted in the story), many middle-class parents can’t afford pre-k. It’s in society’s interest to make sure that their children, too, are well prepared for school. It costs far more to provide remedial education and to deal with the consequences of high school drop-outs than it would to make pre-k universal.

Now, I am skeptical that expanding the reach and scope of government is going to do much to address the problems that Morris cited — especially when it entails spending another $300 million a year, which must be extacted from the very same overextended working/middle class taxpayers. But I don’t mind having the debate. The Kaine administration is raising a legitimate issue, and I would like to see the Kaniacs make the very best argument they can. At this point, however, either the argument isn’t being made properly or it’s not making it through the media filter. The cogent points that Morris articulated in a short private conversation with me have yet to enter the public domain.

During their 2005 fiscal years, Virginia hospitals provided almost $1 billion in charity care to patients — more than triple their 2000 contributions, according to a report filed by Virginia Health Information. Where does that money come from? From hospitals — and their privately insured patients.

Which paying customers? Not Medicare or Medicaid. The federal government is so big and has so much purchasing power that it can set its reimbursement rates at below market rates. One in five hospitals in Virginia lost money in 2005. As a rule, those were hospitals stuck with a higher percentage of indigent patients (who pay nothing) and Medicaid patients (who get the lowest reimbursements) and the fewest private pays (which pay the most). The healthiest hospitals tend to be the suburban facilities that can pass the losses from their unprofitable business onto privately insured patients.

It’s just one more way to shaft the middle class. The progressive federal tax code is bad enough, especially now that the Alternative Minimum Tax is kicking in for tens of millions of taxpayers. But it’s only the beginning. The Virginia income tax is more progressive now than it was in 2004, thanks to “tax reform.” There is also the higher ed wealth transfer in the form of higher tuitions that help pay for scholarships for the needy. And, then, there’s the health care system paid for predominantly by working-class and salaried stiffs whose insurance premiums go up 10 percent a year.

It never ends.

The Virginia Department of Transportation has opened the first design-build roadway project in Virginia, doubling the out-bound shipping capacity of APM Terminals in Portsmouth. The private design-build team, which included contractor Tidewater Skanska and engineering firm Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, completed the $22 million project ahead of schedule.

Said Greg Lassiter, director of Design-Build Delivery for VHB: “The resulting time savings from this design-build contract meant lower costs for the Commonwealth of Virginia and earlier utilization of APMT’s marine container terminal. This project is a model of what the design-build method should be all about.”

Construction of the new interchange involved raising Route 164, a four-lane limited-access highway, 25 feet to accommodate an overpass over the new APM Terminals Boulevard. Careful construction phasing enabled all four lanes of highway traffic to be maintained throughout the project. Other improvements included extensive utility and drainage work, as well as reconfiguration of an existing highway exit and upgrades to commercial and government access roads. The roadway layout was chosen to minimize wetland impacts. (Read the VDOT press release.)