Bacon's Rebellion

Luis Padilla, the Cargill employee in Harrisonburg who was fired for posting a sign — “Please Vote for Marriage on November 7th” — in his pickup truck, has been given his job back. According to DNR Online:

The company is … expected to issue a new policy on employee expression on Monday that will allow Padilla to display the sign that led to his dismissal. “We haven’t seen the actual policy yet,” Wesley Carter, manager of Cargill’s Timberville plant said in the joint announcement, “but we are confident that under it, Mr. Padilla’s sign would not have been a problem.

“This was all a big misunderstanding,” Carter said in the statement. “After reviewing all of the facts surrounding this case, we are satisfied that Mr. Padilla did everything in his power to comply with our requests and that there was no insubordination on his part.”

Cargill did the right thing. I’ll probably vote against the marriage amendment, but that doesn’t mean I think that Padilla should have been fired for expressing his pro-amendment views in the way he did.

Ozone levels in Richmond and Hampton Roads has improved so much, reports Rex Springston with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, that the Environmental Protection Agency will drop both regions from the national list of smoggy areas.

The popping of the real estate bubble is hitting with a vengeance in Northern Virginia, according to the latest numbers compiled by the Virginia Association of Realtors. The average sales price for a home in Northern Virginia was $512,00, down $31,100 from the year before.

Long-time homeowners should escape unscathed — their property values rose so much during the boom that they should have plenty of cushion. But not all homebuyers were prudent boys and girls. Some, we can presume, tapped their rising homeowner’s equity to fund lavish spending. Others bought more house than they really needed or could afford, and now face the prospect of getting sucked dry by mortgage debt. As one of my Northern Virginia friends noted disdainfully, many purchasers of the $1 million McMansions are “house poor.” They’re spending so much of their income on mortgage payments, they don’t have enough money to furnish their houses.

While house values go down, fixed mortgages stay stable and adjustable rate mortgages go up, there is no indication that the local tax burden will decrease. My hunch is that the level of palpable unhappiness in Northern Virginia will rise exponentially, and voters will express their wrath at anyone they perceive as costing them more money. Raise regional taxes for transportation? Er… maybe in the next election cycle.

Northern Virginia is not the only place feeling pain. The Eastern Shore and Massanutten markets have seen precipitous declines as well. (Can anyone say “second home”?) To my surprise home values have increased modestly in Hampton Roads. And Richmond… well, what can I say about my home town? We’re a year behind every trend. Apparently, housing prices rose about 10 percent. Pssst. Guys, the housing boom is over. You can stop now.

Illegal immigrants get most of the attention in the immigration debate. We know, or think we know, who they are — overwhelmingly Hispanics from Latin America. But what is the origin of the major legal immigrants to Virginia?

Drawing upon 2004 figures, a Virginia Association of Realtors research report lists the following:

Of a total of 21,695 legal immigrants, the top contributors were:

India… 2,269
El Salvador… 1,575
The Philippines… 1,265
Korea… 1,009
China… 888
Vietnam… 841

It won’t be easy upgrading Virginia’s educational system if we don’t know what needs upgrading. Everyone agrees, for instance, that the high school drop-out rate is too high. But ask them, “how high,” and they can’t give you a meaningful answer.

The reason is that public school systems use different formulas to calculate the number. Comparing graduation rates is like comparing apples and oranges, explains Cathy Grimes with the Daily Press, reporting on a meeting of the state board of education.

Virginia requires local school districts to report their graduation rates to the state, but districts need not use the same formula to figure out who earned a diploma and who did not. “We just take what they give us,” said Julie Grimes, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education.

Critics have argued that the lack of a uniform system means districts can inflate their graduation rates, making their high schools look better. Or they can mask or miscount dropouts and transfer students.

It would be really nice if the educational establishment could get the basic facts straightened out before barraging the taxpayers with requests for more money.

Update: Apparently, this discussion results from HB19, sponsored by Del. William H. Fralin Jr., R-Roanoke, and passed by the General Assembly this spring, that “directs the Board of Education to collect, analyze, and report high school graduation and drop out data using a formula prescribed by the Board.”

As the calendar peels away before the election, Virginians still support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages by a wide margin. The latest poll, by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, shows Virginians favoring the amendment 52 percent to 42 percent. That represents a shift of four percentage points against the amendment since late July, but amendment foes don’t appear to have enough momentum to change the final result materially.

I guess I’ll be on the losing side again. My inclination is to oppose the amendment. Here’s why: A constitutional amendment offers no flexibility. If you don’t like the way things turn out, there’s no easy way to fix it. You can’t go, “Oh, we didn’t think of that, we’ll just patch it up with a piece of legislation next year.” The process of amending the state constitution is simply too cumbersome, and rightfully so, to permit fine tuning.

I’m not a constitutional scholar, so I cannot make an intelligent judgment on what the amendment means for the legal rights of gays. Some experts say one thing, some say another. The only thing we know with any certainty is that people will file lawsuits, that judges will rule on them, that the rulings will be appealed, and that the state Supreme Court has the final say-so. If we don’t like the rulings, that’s too bad. We’re stuck.

Like many who support the amendment, I feel that traditional values, many of which I share, are under siege in our society today. But you protect those values by winning in the marketplace of ideas and winning in the electoral process, not by trying to enshrine them in the state constitution,. I’m still open to new arguments, but if the election were today, there’s an 80 percent chance I would vote no.

The HOT lane proposal for Interstates 395/95 is moving ahead. The Virginia Department of Transportation has signed an interim agreement with Fluor Virginia and Transurban USA, agreeing to split the $53 million cost of the engineering/study phase.

Fluor/Transurban propose adding a third lane to the existing HOV corridor that would allow high-occupancy vehicles to drive free and charge variable, time-of-day tolls for other drivers. Additionally, the original proposal called for building six park-and-ride lots and upgrading 12 bus stations.

The state is taking a risk, observes Kelly Hannon with the Free Lance-Star, because there’s no guarantee that the detailed study will show the project to be economical. In 2003, Fluor/Transurban estimated a cost of $913 million, but there has been considerable inflation in the construction sector since then. Studies for the two legs of the project should wrap up by early 2009.

Meanwhile, with a hat tip to blogger Jon Baliles, Trucker.com is reporting: “Utah has opened its first fee-for-service highway by allowing a limited number of solo drivers to use carpool lanes on Interstate 15 for a monthly $50 fee. The initial offering of 600 passes is sold out.”

The monthly subscription approach is an approach to congestion pricing that I have not seen discussed in Virginia.

Jumping aboard the bullet-fast Virginia blog train, Phyllis Randall offers up her entry, called A Moderate Voice. With a tagline as “The place where people from all political affiliations can discuss, learn, and laugh,” Randall describes her ideology by saying that, “Conservatives call me liberal, liberals call me conservative; depending on the issue, either characterization could be correct,”

A political consultant and activist who resides in Loudoun County, Phyllis is a Christian from a military family and pro-military moderate-to-conservative Democrat. A graduate of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, she asserts that, “I did not choose politics it chose me; it is the passion God has placed in my heart. For me, being actively involved in our political system is not merely my choice, it is my responsibility.”

Appealing to that vast silent center that comprises the swing vote come election time, Phyllis believes that “the majority of Americans believe as I do; that usually no one party or one politician is all good or all bad. However, often rational, moderate voices are crowded out, while the vocal minority sets policy and creates legislation. This blog is my effort to let moderate voices rise to the top; and to discuss, educate and enjoy.” Her blog is not limited to Virginia local and state affairs, as her initial posts have touched on Barack Obama, the Iraq War, the Darfur crisis, and the on-going tension between evangelical Christians and the GOP.

Having met Phyllis at a recent Sorensen event, I definitely can attest to her graciousness, thoughtfulness and energy. In joining the fray, she also becomes the Commonwealth’s third discernable African-American blogger covering Virginia politics and the first from the northern part of Virginia. This is definitely a plus for both Vivian Paige and me as we try to encourage (and hopefully inspire) more and more black Virginians to set up shop in the blogosphere.

Let’s all give Phyllis and her Moderate Voice a warm welcome!

Jim Bacon raises a lot of good points in his recent article “The Devolution Solution” but “devolution” is not a “solution” by any stretch.

It will be an important part of the “solution” only when there is Fundamental Change in governance structure. Any devolution (or assection) of power and responsibilty must go to a level of governance that matches the level of impact of its decisions, programs and actions.

Equally important, there must be enough levels of governance so that they match all the organic components of human settlement patterns.

Without this Fundamental Change, large municipal governments will continue to make the “beggar thy neighbor” decision that are making settlement patterns more dysfunctional.

These are decisions like the Occquan Life Style Five Acre Lot action in Fairfax that has had the same impact as the Montgomery County TDR program that we noted in our post “MORE ON TRANSFER OF PROPERTY RIGHTS” 10 Oct 2006.

We noted with interest that in the September 2006 New Urban News the practice of creating more than just homes associations is now back in vogue to protect the intent, uniqueness and quality of Traditional Neighborhood Developments. We did this in the 70s to provide the residents of Burke Centre (an Alpha Village scale agglomeration) and Franklin Farm (an Alpha Neighborhood scale agglomeration) against some of the unfortunate homogenizing impacts of the mega-municipality of Fairfax County which is a multi-Alpha Community scale agglomeration.

By the way if you think Jim has only recently started pointing out why we need Fundamental Change, I borrowed the phrase “beggar thy neighbor” from a cover story in Virginia Business
when Jim was editor / publisher. Too bad the current staff there only publish things that make the advertisers happy.

Back to “solutions.” The same problem exists with other “solutions” such as granting the power to create traffic special service districts on a jurisdictional basis rather than an area of impact basis.

There are no “solutions” to the Mobility and Access Crisis or the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis Fundamental Change in human settlement patterns and that requires Fundamental Change in governance structure.

EMR

Wiley Mitchell and Trip Pollard give a thumbs up to the Commonwealth Transportation Board for its decisions regarding proposed $13 billion proposal to upgrade Interstate 81. Writing in the Times-Dispatch, they laud the more limited plan that targets specific bottlenecks and safety hazards. The new plan, they say:

• Places a priority on identifying and improving safety “hot spots,” recognizing that serious problems exist in relatively few places;
• Places a priority on identifying points, such as exit ramps, where relatively small improvements can relieve significant congestion;
• Supports prompt improvements to parallel rail lines to divert additional trucks as soon as possible;
• Endorses comprehensive study of rail improvements in and out of Virginia, to determine the maximum feasible diversion of trucks to rail; and
• Requires that all highway construction, whether related to safety or congestion, use a “context sensitive” approach that minimizes damage to affected communities and the environment.

As positive as the CTB position is, the board needs to stretch a little further. As the authors say, the new plan:

• Overlooks many of the most effective safety measures, including ncreased enforcement of speed limits;
• Overlooks improvements to local street networks to provide local traffic a better alternative to I-81;
• Fails to consider the obvious link between transportation and land-use planning; and Grossly underestimates the environmental damage idening I-81 would cause.

At least they’re learning.

(Mitchell serves on the Virginia Rail Advisory Board. Pollard directs the Land & Community Program at the Southern Environmental Law Center.)

Bart Hinkle at the Richmond Times-Dispatch strikes again, demonstrating once more that he’s one of the few editorial writers in Virginia with an interest in broadening the transportation debate beyond the taxes-or-no taxes dead end. Today he starts with the question: “From 1985 to 2004, the number of cell phone subscribers in America rose 5,300 percent. So why don’t the networks suffer from paralyzing gridlock?”

The answer: Because they use congestion pricing. “You … pay service charges depending on how long you talk and where you go while you’re talking. … Those service charges enable the phone companies to build more towers and extend their service even further. The system pays for its own growth.” If cell phone companies use congestion pricing, why not VDOT?

Hinkle kindly quotes some of my writing on Bacon’s Rebellion, and even cites one of our readers — Larry Gross, I believe it was — who used the cell phone analogy in one of his comments. It can get lonely out here in the blogosphere. It’s nice to have a friend in the MSM.

Ken Anderson, of Blacksburg, has forwarded to me a 2003 study, “Highways and Sprawl in North Carolina,” by David T. Hartgen, professor of transportation studies at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and written for the John Locke Foundation. Clearly, the Tarheels are asking many of the same questions that we are in Virginia.

For this study, Hartgen surveyed a voluminous amount of academic literature on the connection between transportation and “sprawl,” and compiled a massive amount of data: population change by census tract, household size, job creation, income growth, travel times, and road projects constructed during the 1990s. His major conclusion: “This study between growth and road improvements in North Carolina finds only a modest correlation between road investments and [residential] growth.”

“Major road improvements can have a modest effect on the magnitude of growth and its specific location,” Hartgen writes, “but they are not in and of themselves either sufficient or necessary for growth. Most growth will occur in the absence of road improvements, going to areas where space is available.”

Rural economic development. The backdrop of Hartgen’s study was a program by North Carolina to jump-start growth in small towns and poor counties to bring 90 percent of the state’s population within 10 miles of a four-lane road, an effort projected to cost about $13 billion back in 1989. (You can double that number to get an idea of what it would cost today.)

“The determinants of [census] tract growth are largely local,” Hartgen concluded. “Tract growth is influenced largely by local economic health, housing quality, schools, taxes, infrastructure provision and a host of other factors. This means that local governments hoping to spur growth should generally look within, not to Raleigh or Washington, for the key actions needed.”

That finding should give pause to communities in Southside and Southwest Virginia that look to multibillion-dollar road improvement projects — the Coalfield Expressway, Interstate 73, four-laning of U.S. 58 — for their economic salvation. The projects are so vast in scope that they are, for all practical purposes, unaffordable. Even if the state, local and federal government could scrape up the billions of dollars required, the investment would yield low economic returns. It would make far more sense — this is Bacon speaking, not Hartgen — to invest the money otherwise: in education, in broadband connectivity, in quality-of-life enhancements.

Induced demand. Hartgen also takes a position contrary to one that I have espoused on the issue of “induced demand.” By temporarily lowering the cost of travel, many have argued, road improvements encourage families to move farther from job centers to areas where they can find more affordable housing. Over time, as new development projects arise on the urban periphery, those roads fill up. The result: More people driving farther — on roads that become increasingly congested.

Hartgen found that the phenomenon of induced demand does exist, but it is relatively minor in explaining where growth occurs. “These effects are likely to be largest in suburban tracts where growth is rapid and where congestion increases the area’s attractiveness. However, the relative impact of these effects is modest, about 2-14 percentage points added to baseline growth. And the overall effect is typically small. An additional 500 persons (a large effect of a road improvement) would generate about the same traffic as a single small McDonalds Restaurant, about 1,500 trips per day.”

However, I think there is one big hole in Hartgen’s methodology. Induced demand does not occur overnight. It takes years for developers to assemble the land, line up the permitting and build new housing tracts, and even longer for new households to move in. In other words, there is a built-in delay. However, the scope of Hartgen’s project covers the decade of 1990 to 2000. As he notes, “This study does not look at the longer-term (20-30 year) impact of major roads on recent growth. Such a study while useful is beyond the scope of the research and introduces even greater uncertainty as to the causes of growth.”

More accurately stated, then, Hartgen finds that the induced demand of road projects is modest within a time frame of 10 years or less. Beyond that — who knows?

Density caps. Hartgen makes one other interesting point: The location of growth is guided less by the existence of roads than by the amount of room to accommodate it. “When local planners set zoning, they are essentially specifying its residential capacity. Growth slows as it nears this limit, because land prices rise and parcels get harder to assemble. Developers sometimes receive variances to increase development above current zoning limits but they also look to nearby less-developed tracts. Near urban regions this growth goes primarily to the edges of urban regions where tracts have room for it.”

Extrapolated to Virginia, that means, if the residents of Loudoun, Prince William, Clark, Fauquier, Culpeper, Orange and other counties on the edge of Northern Virginia want to preserve their small-town and farming way of life, stalling transportation improvements won’t do the job. As long as core jurisdictions — Fairfax, Arlington and Alexandria cap residential density while creating new jobs, the development will move outward, roads or no roads.

A private-sector plan to add four HOT lanes to the Virginia portion of the I-495 Beltway has become so expensive, reports Eric Weiss with the Washington Post, that it may require up to $100 million in public money to make it work. Turns out that the projected cost of the improvements has increased 30 percent since the Fluor/Transurban partnership originally proposed it.

That’s a big blow to the Kaine administration, which had pinned its hopes on private-sector investment to upgrade the major transportation corridors in Northern Virginia. Secretary of Transportation Pierce Homer says still backs the project: “We are fully committed to building and funding the HOT lanes through a combination of state, federal and private resources. We’ll find a way to make this project work. It’s too important to the region to do anything less. We have an opportunity to obtain a billion-dollar facility with a fraction of that put in by the public sector.”

I was a big fan of the project — when it wasn’t asking for public dollars. Now I’m dubious. If the original financing doesn’t work, Fluor/Transurban needs to hike its tolls for accessing the HOT lanes. If travelers aren’t willing to pay higher tolls, then that should tell us something. Maybe it means that, as much as Northern Virginians want relief from traffic congestion, they don’t want it so bad that they’re willing to pay for it themselves. Maybe it means that we’re witnessing another demonstration of Bastiat’s dictum: Government is a device to enable everyone to live at the expense of everyone else.

(Hat tip to Larry Gross for pointing me to this article.)

A Virginia Department of Transportation study counted 4.4 million trucks traveling through the Shenandoah Valley each year. In 2004, Norfolk Southern estimated that an expenditure of $875 million could take 500,000 trucks off Interstate 81 each year, but it can’t justify making the entire investment itself. “The capital investment will be greater than the benefits we would receive from it,” said railroad spokesman Robin Chapman. “We could not justify that spending on our own.”

Now, according to the Associated Press, the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation is working with Norfolk Southern to examine the feasibility of state involvement in upgrading Norfolk Southern’s track. The study will look at rail improvements not just in Virginia but in an arc from Harrisburg, Pa., to Knoxville, Tenn.

Makes sense — certainly a lot more sense than the multi-billion dollar boondoggles proposed for upgrading I-81. If rail is the more cost-effective alternative, we need to consider it. On the other hand, if Norfolk Southern can’t justify investing in its own railroad track, I question whether the Commonwealth is justified subsidizing the project any more than any other transportation project.

Update: Be sure to read the informative commentary by “Anon 10:50” in the comments section, outlining the analysis of Norfolk Southern CEO Wick Moorman. Intermodal traffic is increasingly profitable for the railroad company but there are special challenges serving the I-81 corridor in Virginia.

On the campaign trail, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine popularized the disconnect between transportation and land use planning. As I chronicled in “Seventy-five Years” in a previous edition of Bacon’s Rebellion, that disconnect did not occur overnight — it stemmed from the inability of Virginia’s governance system to adapt to changing human settlement patterns over the past few decades.

Although Kaine’s big idea was never cast into law — he would have given local governments more authority to deny rezoning requests where development would overwhelm local road networks — Republican lawmakers picked up the transportation/land use theme. In the short, tumultuous September session on transportation, the House Republican Caucus outlined new roles for local government, the private sector and the Virginia Department of Transportation in building and maintaining state roads.

The House legislative package represented the most radical re-thinking of transportation in Virginia since 1932, when the current system was put into place. Although these bills, too, failed to make it into law, the ideas behind them are very much alive. Indeed, there is widespread recognition among key players in the transportation debate that the House raised legitimate issues, even if the details of its legislation need work.

This edition of Bacon’s Rebellion focuses on one of the centerpiece House initiatives: devolving responsibility for secondary roads from VDOT to local government. While everyone agrees that VDOT should build and maintain primary roads and Interstates, most of the people I interviewed agreed that it often makes sense to turn authority for secondary roads over to local governments, particularly the fast-growth counties. The trick, as I explain in “The Devolution Solution,” is devising a funding formula that assures counties that they won’t be left holding the fiscal bag.

The transportation/land use disconnect manifests itself in at least two ways in the treatment of secondary roads. The incentives of the current system are all wrong. Local governments approve hundreds of miles of subdivision roads every year, knowing that VDOT will get stuck with the cost of maintaining them — about $1.5 million more each year… year after year. Likewise, local officials ignore the issue of subdivision connectivity, approving cul-de-sac subdivions that dump traffic onto collector roads and contribute nothing to an interconnected road network. If the collector roads get congested, who cares, that’s the state’s problem.

The issue of who builds and maintains Virginia’s secondary roads is only one piece of the transportation puzzle, but an important one. Devolution won’t cure our traffic woes — but it will limit the introduction of low-density cul de sacs into the state system, and it will improve the connectivity of new subdivisions. It makes no sense to pump more money into a transportation system as badly broken as Virginia’s is. Reform first, money second.