Bacon's Rebellion

How realistic are the revenue assumptions of Hampton Roads transportation planners? Del. Leo Wardrup, R-Virginia Beach, argued yesterday that the region’s transportation plan is based on faulty assumptions about how much the region’s drivers would be willing to pay at the tollbooth, reports Tom Holden with the Virginian-Pilot.

Using low toll rates, [lawmakers] said, forced Hampton Roads planners to seek a larger increase in transportation funding from the General Assembly when it met in special session in September. The “ridiculously low tolls” forced the General Assembly to turn down tax or fee increases intended to close a transportation funding gap, said Del. Leo Wardrup, R-Virginia Beach and chairman of the House Transportation Committee. …

Regional officials had pleaded with lawmakers to approve $275 million in new funding for 30 years and authorize imposing tolls on existing and new facilities to help finance six major projects.

This is an interesting debate. When financing major transportation projects, planners must make realistic assumptions about toll revenues. How many people will use the tolled facility, and how much will they pay? The original investors in the Dulles Greenway found out what happens when optimistic toll projections fall short — they got taken to the cleaners. Over-optimistic toll projects also led to the restructuring and privatization of the Pocahontas Parkway southeast of Richmond. In sum, there are good reasons to be cautious.

But Wardrup also may have a point. If toll projections are too low, a different problem is created. Either projects don’t get built that could have been, or the special interests lobby for state subsidies that may not be needed.

I have no idea whether Wardrup is right or wrong, whether the postulated tolls are too low or too high. But I think his comments open up an important debate. Before any region of Virginia talks about raising billions of dollars in taxes, there must be a clear understanding of what the real demand is for the proposed transportation improvements. By “real” demand, I mean what value real people in the real world would put on the improvements, as measured by their willingness to pay tolls. If users aren’t willing to pay what it costs to build a road, is there any justification for building it?

As I’ve argued in other contexts, the business and political elites value their time more highly, therefore they are more distressed than ordinary Virginians by traffic congestion. Trouble is, they want everyone to share in paying for improvements. That’s just wrong. That’s why transportation improvements should be structured so that those who benefit from them pay for them.

Style Weekly has the details of the long-rumored editorial shake-up at the Richmond Times-Dispatch: two deputy managing editors laid off, the shuttering of the South Boston bureau, the scrapping of Mark Holmberg’s column, and various reassignments of responsibility. In a nod to the increasing importance of digital media, reports Greg A Lohr, “the newspaper is emphasizing multimedia, creating a specialized ‘swat team’ of reporters and editors who will be responsible for exclusive Web content.”

I know both of the editors losing their jobs, and they have my sympathy . I hope they held out for good severance packages. One of them, Howard Owen, is a successful novelist — Rock of Ages is his latest of eight — so, I wouldn’t be surprised if he views his departure as an opportunity to pursue his true passion.

Given the mass layoffs that other newspapers have seen, the Times-Dispatch newsroom is getting off fairly easily. Here is the ineluctable reality: Readership nationally, and locally, is down, revenue growth has slowed to a crawl and costs continue to rise. Website readership is soaring, but newspapers have yet to develop a Web business model that’s as profitable as it is for print. Every newspaper in the country is being forced to make hard choices, and the T-D is no exception.

I will be particularly interested to see (a) how the T-D deploys its Web-content SWAT team, and (b) whether the T-D can generate meaningful revenues from that content.

The T-D faces some serious organizational issues in making its Web initiative a success. The T-D is part of the Media General media conglomerate, which has bequeathed authority over all websites to its Interactive Media Division (IMD). The T-D website has a lot of editorial autonomy, but, to the best of my knowledge, its business operations fall under IMD. There is an inherent tension. IMD is run by technocrats who don’t share the T-D newsroom’s journalistic ethos. Additionally, IMD managers will allocate resources in such a way as to maximize their own departmental profits (and personal bonuses), not those of the T-D. What does the T-D get out of building a bigger, stronger website? I’m not sure.

Unless Media General has figured out a way to resolve those inherent organizational tensions — usually perceived by the participants in terms of of personality clashes, with all the attendant emotional flare-ups — I question whether the T-D newsroom will have its heart in making the Web initiative a success. The ongoing saga may be an issue that Style Weekly should follow.

In early September, we profiled the efforts of Spotsylvania County build its way out of its transportation woes — voters last year approved a $144 million bond referendum. (See “Spotsy Turvy,” Sept. 8, 2006.) In theory, jurisdictions that take on prime responsibility for building and maintaining their own roads will make a greater effort to support transportation-efficient human settlement patterns. Trouble was, I observed back then, there wasn’t much evidence of such development in Spotsylvania.

Now we’ve gone back for a closer look. There still isn’t much transportation-efficient development, but that’s mainly because previous zoning decisions created a pipeline of unfortunate development. Land use planning was so basic that Spotsylvania County didn’t even have a land-use map to show what kind of development was supposed to go where. As Bob Burke reports today in our update, “Spotsy on the Spot” (I’ll take the blame for the bad puns in the headlines):

Without a land-use map, “what do you measure a rezoning against?” asks Ric Goss, the county’s planning director, who arrived in May 2003 after the current comprehensive plan was already written. “If you don’t have a land-use plan that tells you where you want to go, how do you make these decisions?”

The good news for Spotsylvania residents is that the current Board of Supervisors is getting serious about changing the dysfunctional development patterns. In addition to creating a new map, supervisors are considering the traffic impact of rezoning requests, concentrating development around transportation corridors, encouraging mixed use, promoting transit-oriented development and permitting higher densities. All moves in the right direction.

Given the backlog of bad development, however, traffic is likely to get worse before it gets better — even with that $144 million to spend on roads. Let’s hope that voters don’t draw the wrong conclusions and blame land use reforms which haven’t even been implemented yet.

Here is an interesting juxtaposition of stories.

First comes this from Michael Hardy at the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

The General Assembly is very unlikely to grapple again with a statewide transportation fix before the 2008 session of the legislature. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine conceded as much yesterday, arguing that lawmakers rarely act on major issues during the so-called short session when they are largely focused on the coming elections.

“I’m a realist about this,” Kaine explained. “It’s really hard to make something happen in a short session. The ’07 session is not for big heavy lifting.”

Kaine is saving his energy for the 2008 session, when retirements and defeats of key Republican legislors could produce “a new dynamic” in the assembly.

Then there’s this from Tom Holden at the Virginian-Pilot:

House Republican leaders said Tuesday they will resubmit next year many of the same transportation ideas that died during September’s special legislative session. House Speaker Del. William Howell, R-Stafford, … emphasized in a meeting with The Virginian-Pilot’s editorial writers that his party represents more than a no-new-taxes bloc .

The House leadership wants to streamline VDOT, eliminating as many as 700 positions. House leaders, according to Holden, also back “improved coordination between local land use and road planning, greater reliance on private money to finance new construction and greater use of tolls.”

On the one hand, the House is trying to work through some very complex issues; on the other, the Governor is blowing off the House proposals. (Says Kaine spokesman Kevin Hall: “At some point these guys have got to quit beating up on VDOT and pony up some resources to build some roads.”) On the one hand, the House wants to get down to business when the assembly reconvenes in two months; on the other the Governor wants to put off the transportation debate until he can defeat his opponents in next fall’s elections.

Who’s the obstructionist now?

A 110-foot roundabout, due for completion next spring, will create an attractive southern gateway to the city of Portsmouth’s revitalized downtown. Reports Janie Bryant with the Virginian-Pilot:

The road design eliminates several of the roads now feeding in and out of Crawford Street and frees up extra land on its northwestern side to make room for what will likely be a mid rise residential development.

The added land for development is one of the benefits of the new traffic design but not the main point, city engineer Richard Hartman said. … “This would provide a focal point for downtown. … It’s more of an identity of a destination.”

Downtown Portsmouth, once one of Virginia’s seedier urban districts, is making a tremendous come-back. Overshadowed by the spectacular revitalization of downtown Norfolk across the river, downtown Portsmouth is one of Virginia’s best kept secrets. The city has built on its waterfront and historic buildings to create a very attractive and liveable place. To see other renderings of Portsmouth Vision 2005, visit the Urban Design Associates website.

There are huge disconnects between transportation and land use planning in the Washington New Urban Region. State/local government, the usual offender, is not the only perpetrator. Alec MacGillis with the Washington Post examines the impact of locational decisions made by the federal government.

Recent offenders: The FBI, the FDA and the Pentagon. In case after case, federal agencies have sought to save money by moving to lower-cost real estate on the fringe of the region. But they costs they save are their own. They are not considering the impact of longer commutes for employees, or the burden on state/local government to build new transportation facilities to serve the new job locations.

Supporters and foes of Highland New Wind Development’s proposal to erect 19 windmills on a 4,300-foot-high ridge in Highland County presented their case yesterday in a State Corporation Commission hearing. The arguments in a nutshell, according to Greg Edwards with the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Wind energy’s supporters see it as preferable to power generated by burning coal or other fossil fuels. Wind power, they say, can cut pollution that sickens people and contributes to global warming.

Opponents see windmills as a threat to migratory birds, bats and other wildlife. The mammoth structures will scar a pristine landscape and hurt tourism, they say.

It is imperative that the United States — and that includes Virginia — develop clean, non-polluting sources of energy. It’s an imperative for reasons of energy security, reducing acid rain and other local forms of pollution and, if you believe Al Gore, slowing the onset of global warming. If Virginia can’t build a wind farm in remote, sparsely populated Highland County, then it’s unlikely we’ll ever build a wind farm anywhere in the state.

Foes cited a study of Pennsylvania and West Virginia wind farms that revealed “unacceptable fatality rates for birds and bats.” Now, I’m all in favor of protecting wildlife, and I’m open to the idea of halting the project — if the carnage is bloody enough.

But I would like to know what those “unacceptable” rates are. How many dead birds and bats? Are any of them endangered species? Has anyone devised a way to reduce wildlife fatalities? If so, how effective is it, what would it cost, and would it imperil the financing of the wind farm? These are all questions the SCC need answers to before ruling against the windfarm.

Just remember: According to the Energy Information Administration, electricity usage is expected to rise anywhere between 11 percent to 17 percent by 2015.

(Photo credit: Campaign to Protect Rural England.)

I’m an atheist and a Darwinist. I don’t go to church except to attend weddings and the odd Christmas or Easter service. I’m what you might call “secular.” The difference between other secularists and me is that I respect my Christian heritage. I don’t take offense at the display of traditional Christian symbols in the public domain — Christianity is, after all, part of America’s cultural endowment — and I would never, never presume to be offended by the display of a Christian symbol, like a cross, in a Christian setting, like a chapel.

But some people feel differently. The College of William & Mary has now taken to removing the cross from the alter in the Wren Chapel during the building’s use for non-religious events. As reported by the Cavalier Daily:

William & Mary President Gene Nichol released a statement to the college community saying that he has “not banished the cross from the Wren Chapel. The Chapel … is used for religious ceremonies by members of all faiths. The cross will remain in the Chapel and be displayed on the altar at appropriate religious services.”

However, Nichol continued that “the Chapel is also used frequently for College events that are secular in nature — and should be open to students and staff of all beliefs” and “must be welcoming to all.”

This is rich: A Christian chapel can be “welcoming” only by denying the central symbol of the Christian religion. Even some Muslims, it appears, have more respect for Christian symbols than does William & Mary’s secular administration. The Cavalier Daily quoted Ilgaz Toros, a second-year engineering student at the University of Virginia and a practicing Muslim: “The fact that it is a religious place shouldn’t be denied.”

(Photo credit: William & Mary.)

Update: Brian Ledbetter, a “lifelong Virginian and current resident of the northern parts of the Commonwealth, er, make that ‘Lower’ New York,” posted on this story before I did — and adds a few choice observations of his own. Read his post at “Snapped Shot.”

Update: Good editorial in the Virginian-Pilot. Those fellows make sense when they’re not writing about transportation!

Everyone loves trolleys. Some people actually ride them. But riders never pay close to what the trolleys cost to operate. The latest foolishness comes from Virginia Beach, where city officials are studying what to do with the money-losing trolley system, the VB Wave, that serves the beachfront resort area.

Reports Richard Quinn with the Virginian-Pilot:

Oceanfront leaders say VB Wave – the trolley system run by Hampton Roads Transit – is plagued by aging vehicles, frequent delays and malfunctioning ticketing machines. The useful life of a trolley is considered seven years and 300,000 miles, according to HRT. The fleet in Virginia Beach has an average age of more than 11 years, and each has been driven an average of 276,000 miles.

According to Quinn, Virginia Beach pays HRT about 10 percent of what it costs to operate the 32 trolleys. For fiscal 2006, that was $243,000 — or more than $7,500 per bus. That number doesn’t include state and federal support. Nor does it include the cost of replacing the aging fleet at a cost of $400,000 per vehicle. Faced with mounting costs, city officials are examining their options.

Ridership remains strong, topping 410,000 this summer, so the trolleys appear to be fairly popular. The main beneficiaries, besides the riders themselves, are the merchants in the resort area, the Lynnhaven Mall and assorted campgrounds on General Booth Boulevard. Why can’t an arrangement be made to dun these businesses, either through siphoning off a slice of the existing meal-and-foods tax or imposing a special fee? Remarkably, that was not one of the options mentioned in the article.

The businesses that benefit from the trolleys should help support the system. If they’re not willing to pony up, then one can conclude only that trolley riders don’t constitute an appreciable share of their customer base…. in which case, the system isn’t worth maintaining.

What is to be done with U.S. 460?

The Times-Dispatch ran dueling op-eds this morning. Pierce Homer, secretary of transportation, makes the case for building a divided, four-lane highway between Suffolk and Petersburg, financing the improvements with tolls and public funds.

Virginia needs an upgraded U.S. 460, Homer argues, for four main reasons: (1) to provide an evacuation corridor out of Hampton Roads in case of hurricanes or other natural disasters; (2) to provide flood-resistant access to communities along U.S. 460, (3) to accommodate the surge of container truck traffic resulting from Hampton Roads ports; and (4) to improve access to the expanding military logistics base at Ft. Lee outside Petersburg. The goals, I think any reasonable person would admit, are all laudable. The question is, are they worth the price tag attached to the project?

The cost is “very substantial,” Homer concedes: in the range of $1 billion to $1.5 billion. Tolls can pay for part of the project, but another $200 million to $1 billion — suggesting a wide range of uncertainty — would have to come from public sources. “Some will brand these sums as excessive or unachievable,” he writes. “But when weighed against our public safety, our economic future, and our national security, these investments in the 460 corridor are necessities of the first order.”

In a companion column, Stewart Schwartz and Lisa Guthrie disagree. Schwartz is executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, and Guthrie executive director of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters.

According to Schwartz and Guthrie, the project is relatively low on the list of Hampton Roads transportation priorities. In contrast to many gridlocked arterials inside the metro area, U.S. 460 is usually free-flowing — and still will be in 20 years!

The big story is that if the new highway is not built, the old U.S. 460 will still be free-flowing along most of its length in 2026. Only the traffic lights in the few towns along 460 contribute to poorer levels of service — a problem that can be addressed by solutions far less costly than a 55-mile-long new highway.

The upgrade would cost between $465 million and $665 million in public funds. That amount of money can pay for a lot of spot improvements to relieve local bottlenecks and leave funds for more pressing priorities.

I’m inclined to agree with Schwartz and Guthrie — at least until more authoritative estimates come in. We need to get a better handle on how much public money the mega-460 alternative would cost. And we need to be able to compare it to the cost and benefits of the “spot improvements” alternative.

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.”