Bacon's Rebellion

The House of Delegates has passed a package of 26 bills related to transportation and land use. Three will be held over for study and re-presented in next year’s session. The rest move to the Senate for consideration. It will be interesting to see which bills survive Senate scrutiny. Despite all the hoo-ha reported by the newspapers, many measures passed by lopsided margins.

There’s some good, bad and indifferent in the package. You won’t get much detail in the press accounts, though, so I have posted the House Speaker’s press release on the Bacon’s Rebellion website here. (I really, really wish he’d get a website and post his press releases so I could just link to them!)

The House leadership is touting the package as a bold leap forward. I would characterize it as a timid step forward — a step in the right direction, but partial and incomplete. Chris Saxman’s congestion-pricing bills (“The Swedish Solution“) aren’t included here. Among the more worthwhile measures:

• Instituting quantifiable congestion goals into the road-approval process
• Soliciting more private investment
• Privatizing more VDOT functions
• Allowing counties to assume control over maintenance of secondary roads
• Bigger penalties for chronic abusive drivers.
• Recategorizing VDOT roadways (primary, secondary, urban) based on functionality
• Limiting the acceptance of new subdivision streets into the state system

I’m intrigued by the concept of Urban Development Districts but want to know more about it. I’m also less than enthralled by the $2.44 billion funding package — for the same reasons I’m less than impressed with the Kaine/Senate proposals for permanent tax increases. The system is broken. Why waste any more money on it until we fix it? These proposals represent no more than a useful start.

What’s significant, to my mind, is not the legislation itself as much as the paradigm shift that’s occurring in the House. The House leadership has broken decisively from the old tax-spend-build mentality and has established good strong themes — change the way VDOT does business, reform land use — in their place. As an institution, the House is now ascending the learning curve. Hopefully, delegates will prove receptive to even more radical departures from Business As Usual in the future.

For all its warts, the House legislative package beats what came out of the Senate and the Governor’s Office — the same warmed over tax hike proposals that were defeated this spring. I had expected as much from the Senate, but I’m disappointed, given his conciliatory rhetoric, that Gov. Kaine has taken such a passive role in embracing change.

“Road-funding debate stalls,” proclaimed the Times-Dispatch headline over the article covering the transportation debate in the General Assembly yesterday. That was as fair and balanced as the story got. It was all down-hill from there.

After noting that the Democrats had successfully stalled Republicans’ $2.4 billion transportation plan, Michael Hardy and Jeff Schapiro weighed in with this third-paragraph “perspective”:

At the heart of the disagreement, now in its ninth month: the resistance of House Republicans to new taxes, which Democrat Kaine and a bipartisan coalition in the Senate say are the only reliable source of additional transportation funds.

Notice that Hardy and Schapiro did not frame the issue this way:

At the heart of the disagreement, now in its ninth month: resistance of House Democrats and their allies in the Senate to overhauling Virginia’s failed transportation system and land use practices, which a bipartisan coalition of environmentalists and fiscal conservatives says is needed before wasting any more money on it.

The article then quoted by name three Democratic delegates, two Republican senators and a Kaine administration spokesman in support of their side of the issue, before getting around to quoting a two delegates — starting in the 24th paragraph — in defense of their side.

And photos? You asked about photos? Pictured in the newspaper (not the Web version) were Frank Hall, Kristen Amundson, Russell Potts and John Chichester — all certified members of the Axis of Taxes. On the other side? Nobody.

It was quite a sight: During the transportation debate in the House of Delegates yesterday, Democrats waved personal credit cards over their heads to mock Republican proposals to borrow $1.5 billion in order to pay for new road projects.

Kaine administration spokesman Kevin Hall dissed the legislative package, telling Hardy/Schapiro with the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

I’m not sure that a proposal to simply incur more debt is the way Virginia wants to plan, build and maintain its transportation network. … That’s like using your Visa card to pay your MasterCard bill.

Someone better tell the backers of the $4 billion (before cost overruns) Metro-to-Dulles heavy rail project! Now that Gov. Kaine opposes the use of debt for building Virginia’s transportation network, there is no way the project will ever be built! Oh, wait… You’re telling me that Gov. Kaine favors borrowing money for that transportation project? … I’m confused.

My point here is not to defend the Republican proposal — I haven’t examined the list of projects to be funded under the plan, and might well disagree with the priorities if I did. My point is to query the Democrats: Since when did the old Byrd Machine “pay as you go” philosophy become the guiding philosophy of the party?

A decade ago, as I recall, Democrats were bashing “pay as you go” as a relic of a past age and were touting the idea of borrowing to build roads. Of course, that was when Jim Gilmore was governor and the prospects of passing a tax hike were precisely zero. The only way to spend more money on roads, it was perceived, was to borrow it. I can’t help suspecting that the underlying principle is not an aversion to debt but a fixation on extracting the maximum amount of cash, whatever the source, to build more roads.

The putative aversion to debt comes, incidentally, from the very same people who raised taxes in 2004 in order to preserve Virginia’s AAA bond rating. The reason the bond rating is so important, we were assured, is that a downgrade would make it more expensive to… borrow money. But now that we’ve preserved the AAA, the Commonwealth has yet to approve any new general obligation bond issues.

I draw the reader’s attention to the chart above, which I extracted from a House Appropriations Committee PowerPoint presentation. The red line shows Virginia’s maximum debt capacity. The pink line shows projected debt levels under existing legislation. The gap is large and growing. Looking forward, Virginia has enormous unused debt capacity. The blue line shows what debt levels would be under the House plan that Democrats want to skewer — still loads of debt capacity.

One final point: Roads are exactly the kind of long-term asset that should be funded with long-term bonds. When an asset is to be used and enjoyed by future generations of taxpayers, those future generations should help pay for it.

The House of Delegates is holding firm against unrelenting pressure to raise taxes that would perpetuate Virginia’s antiquated and wasteful transportation system. The House Finance Committee spiked plans to raise taxes locally in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to fund regional road building projects.

One plan did survive the legislative buzz saw: a $2.4 billion funding package that relied upon a $1.5 billion bond issue that would require voter approval. But journalistic accounts suggested that initiative would be dead on arrival when it moved to the Senate. Read the accounts here:

Richmond Times Dispatch
Washington Post
Virginian Pilot

One’s as good (or bad) as the other. All miss the larger point.

What’s been missing from almost all punditry and political reporting (with rare exceptions) is any sense of the larger issue: Having identified fundamental flaws in Virginia’s traditional transportation policy, the House has laid out a plan for the most sweeping overhaul of Virginia transportation since the Byrd era. These reforms would transform the way VDOT does business: accelerating outsourcing and privatization and delegating responsibility and funding for secondary roads to counties. Grasping the reality that certain patterns of land use generate more traffic congestion than others, the House also has submitted unprecedented proposals to re-shape land use.

Now, it’s one thing to disagree with these proposals and the premises underlying them. Many readers of this blog do that every day. (I don’t even know if I agree with all of the House’s recommendations.) But at least Bacon’s Rebellion readers pay the courtesy of actually engaging the ideas. Virginia’s pundits and political reporters have failed utterly and completely to acknowledge the issues at stake, much less to understand them. Complex pieces of legislation and the thinking behind them warrant one or two throw-away paragraphs buried deep in stories about legislative process. Rather than engage ideas, editorial writers stoop to simple invective and name-calling.

Transportation and land use are not arcane issues — they are all pervasive. They affect every Virginian! Where are the investigative pieces? Where are the in-depth series? Where are the historical backgrounders? What happened to the crusading spirit of Virginia journalism? When did Virginia’s leading newspapers become dogmatic defenders of the status quo? At what point did Virginia journalists become parrots of elite opinion and begin scoffing at the sentiments (as expressed in polls) of ordinary people?

I indict the newspaper profession in Virginia. It has betrayed its journalistic ideals. It has betrayed even its liberal ideals. If the publishers and executive editors of Virginian newspapers are capable of self reflection, this is the time for it.

Lawyers for a black high school student who was rejected by a college journalism program filed a racial discrimination lawsuit Tuesday in federal court. The U.S. District Court lawsuit was filed on behalf of Emily Smith, 15, who said she was accepted last spring to the Suburban Journalism Workshop at the University of Richmond. One week later, she was rejected after program sponsors learned she was black, according to her class-action lawsuit.

Simply amazing. To think that racial discrimination persists in this day and age — perpetuated by an institution of higher education, no less! It’s disgraceful. We need to tear down the walls that separate–

Oh, wait. I didn’t get it quite right. Turns out it was a white student charging discrimination. It was an urban workshop, not a suburban one. And it was VCU, not the University of Richmond.

Well, that’s different. In that case, discrimination is OK. You see, discrimination is not the issue. It’s all about who’s doing the discriminating and who’s being discriminated against. It’s all about power, baby, all about power.

I lifted this chart from an article, “The (Illegal) Immigrant Effect,” in the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank’s “Region Focus” magazine. Surveying economic studies about the econonomic impact of immigration, the article concludes: “Immigrant labor lowers wages for less-skilled native-born Americans, but it also lowers prices for consumers. The biggest economic beneficiaries of immigration are immigrants themselves.”

As an aside, it’s remarkable how Hispanic immigration seems to be transforming the demographics of North Carolina far more than downstate Virginia.

(If you have trouble reading the text in the map, click on the image to enlarge it.)

If you expand the Washington Metro system in Northern Virginia, you expand the number of trains that run. If you expand the number of trains, you hire more transit workers. If you hire more workers, you facilitate the growth of the Amalgamated Transit Union, local 689, and entrust the functioning of the Northern Virginia economy to its ultra-leftist president Mike Golash.

Virginia is headed down the path of spending $4 billion (before cost overruns) to extend Washington Metro rail service to Tysons Corner and Dulles Airport. And just last week, the House of Delegates leadership proposed dedicating $50 million a year in support of Metro’s capital investment plan. (See “Looking Ahead to the Next Metro Expansion.”) It would behoove lawmakers to learn more about the man whose hand is on the Metro throttle.

Go to the ATW website and you’ll see that the union is interested in a lot more than simply improving the wages and working conditions of its members. States Golosh on the president’s page:

Workers’ real leverage against the bosses lies in their ability to shut down production and call their coworkers into the streets. The threat of economic hardship to the bosses and social instability in society causes a real fear in the bosses’ heart. Direct action by workers is the motor that drives us forward to a better standard of living and a more just society, not election results.

If that doesn’t give you pause about selling your SUV and riding the Metro to work, check out the August/September edition of the ATU newsletter. One article writes about New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in the most inflammatory of terms: “It is no coincidence that it is primarily poor black residents that live in the hardest hit areas; slavery and racist laws made sure that the most vulnerable areas of the city are poor black areas.” (Sounds like CNN!) The union also describes the employment of immigrant “guest workers” as “a new kind of slavery.”

Or, how about the article about The Middle East? “People see these fundamentalist groups [like Hezbollah] as taking a stand against U.S. imperialism in the region. … More and more innocent people are dying in these wars for profit and oil. … This is the nature of imperialist war: continuous wars and more innocent people dying. We must fight back against these growing attacks on workers around the world.”

If the rhetoric of class warfare, institutional racism and imperialism sounds almost communist, well that’s because Galosh is, well, a self-avowed communist. Go to the Progressive Labor Party website, where the home page states, “We fight directly for communism.” Check out the July 21, 2004, edition of “The Challenge” newsletter.

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 23 – Progressive Labor Party member Mike Golash has been elected president of the 6,000-member Local 689, Amalgamated Transit Workers Union (ATU). … Amid an imperialist war in Iraq and the rapid rise of a Homeland Security police state, in the face of racist attacks and police terror, and in the shadow of the White House, this local of mainly black workers told the bosses and union hacks, “I’m with Mike!” … Our job is to turn a mass base for a communist into a mass base for communism.

Working at Metro for 28 years, Mike has consistently distributed CHALLENGE to thousands of workers, built a base for PLP, led class struggle and been involved in all union activities, from wildcat strikes to the softball league. … Mike campaigned for ending the racist multi-tier wage progression, militant struggle against management and for international workers’ unity against imperialism.

Who would you rather trust to get Northern Virginians to their jobs every day — Northern Virginians driving their own cars, or members of a left-wing union led by a communist president? Roads don’t go on strike. Transit unions do.

(Hat tip to Ken Reid and Phil Rodokanakis for forwarding the documentation to this story.)

The House Counties, Cities and Towns Committee decided to defer action on land use legislation championed by House Speaker William J. Howell and other Republicans in favor of studying the proposals. “You’re talking about drastic changes,” said Del. Riley Ingram, R-Hopewell, the committee chairman.

According to Chelyen Davis with the Free Lance-Star, Ingram said he’d appoint an ad hoc committee to study the issues, and have the bill patrons reintroduce their legislation for the 2007 session that starts in January.

One of the bills would establish “urban transportation districts” that would allow localities to take over responsibility and funding for maintaining secondary roads. The other would require counties to set up “urban development areas” where they would channel growth.

In one of the main issues that surfaced, according to Davis, Democrats contended that “the state doesn’t provide enough money to maintain the roads anyway, and that localities would find they were saddled with all the responsibility and not enough funding.” Said Del. Kris Amundson, D-Fairfax: “It’s clearly insufficient. What you’re doing is passing on more responsibility than money.”

If the bill would simply fob off responsibility for road maintenance to local government without providing the resources to do the job, then it’s a bad bill. But I’m not certain that the Democratic objections are based in fact. For starters, it’s incorrect to say that “the state doesn’t provide enough money to maintain the roads anyway.” Au contraire, the state prioritizes maintenance spending. Maintenance spending gets first dibs on transportation dollars. That’s why, with escalating maintenance expenses, money for new construction is running out.

A more interesting objection was this: that delegating authority to local governments would lead to a patchwork of maintenance standards across the state. But no one has had a problem with allowing cities and two counties (Henrico and Arlington) to maintain their own roads since… since forever. If the standards are “patchwork,” no one has expressed a problem about them before.

The Family Foundation sent a letter to the No Voters to ask for their definition of marriage. Something I blogged about. If marriage isn’t one man and one woman then say what you want and be honest to the voters. Here is the letter:

September 25, 2006

Dear Claire:

Very soon, Virginians will have to decide on whether to support the marriage amendment at the ballot box. When Virginians cast their ballot on November 7, they deserve to have all the information they need to make an informed decision. As the primary spokesperson and decision maker for Equality Virginia’s ballot committee, The Commonwealth Coalition, I believe that you have a duty to all Virginians to honestly state your organization’s position on the issue of how marriage should be defined in Virginia. Virginians deserve to know how you, the Commonwealth Coalition and Equality Virginia, want marriage to be defined. In addition, they deserve to know the answers to the following questions:

1. What combinations of relationships should be allowed to legally marry? Which should not? Should bisexual groups be allowed to marry? Should polygamy remain illegal?
2. How would you say no to forms of marriage that you oppose?
3. What is the standard for deciding who should be allowed to marry?
4. What plans do your organizations have to bring about changes to marriage laws in the future?

A recent publication stated that, “LGBT organizations have developed a strategic plan to win marriage equality. A 15-year strategy has been agreed to by all the major [gay rights] organizational players. Funding is in place, and new tactics are being developed and tested in this year’s biggest clashes with anti-gay groups.”

Clearly, the goal of organizations such as Equality Virginia and its ballot committee, The Commonwealth Coalition, is to redefine marriage. Virginians deserve to know exactly what you want that definition to be.

It is time that you, as opponents of the marriage amendment, are honest with the people of Virginia and explain to them exactly where you stand on the issue that Virginians will be deciding on November 7th. I look forward to your prompt response.

Sincerely,
Victoria E. Cobb
va4marriage.org

As Doug Koelemay observed in today’s column about the Tofflers’ new book, “Revolutionary Wealth,” different institutions evolve at different rates. If cutting-edge businesses are charging ahead at 100 miles per hour, labor unions are trotting along at 30 m.p.h. and government is trudging behind at 20 m.p.h. (Schools, political institutions and the law are even slower.)

Earlier today, the House of Delegates just mashed the accelerator. Demonstrating its seriousness about devising a comprehensive solution to Virginia’s transportation woes as opposed to papering them over with another round of taxes, House leaders unveiled a three-pronged package intended to bring Virginia land use policies into the 21st century.

These three bills would alter Virginia’s transportation debate beyond recognition. There is simply no way that the Axis of Taxes and the Mainstream Media can continue defining the debate as a simple issue of how much more money is needed and where it’s going to come from. The House is forcing the state Senate to contend with the link between land use and transportation at a more fundamental level than Virginia legislators ever had to before.

House Speaker William J. Howell summed up the philosophy behind the reforms:

Any plan to improve transportation that ignores one of the root causes of clogged roadways – namely, Virginia’s 70-plus-year-old government land use policies – is inherently inadequate, shortsighted and flawed. The Commonwealth can no longer afford to be timid or piecemeal in targeting solutions toward this aspect of the overall challenge. That is why our forward-looking legislation for the first time directly ties land use and transportation. I am firmly behind this initiative to introduce accountability and devolve management as part of a sweeping and much-needed overhaul of Virginia’s approach to land use policy.

The three initiatives include:

• Urban Transportation Service Districts. HB 5093 would allow local county governments to create “urban transportation service districts” and assume responsibility for maintaining all secondary (i.e., subdivision) roads. The state would give localities road maintenance funds equal to what VDOT would spend anyway, which localities could supplement with impact fees.
• Urban Development Areas. HB 5094 would require every county to amend its comprehensive plan to incorporate at least one “urban development area” sufficient to satisfy a full decade of projected residential growth. The goal is to require localities to plan for future development, eliminating the “haphazard ‘shotgun’ approach that has resulted in uneven sprawl and subsequent road congestion,” and to strike a better balance between settlement patterns and transportation system capacity.
• Subdivision streets. HB 5096 would end the practice of taking additional subdivision streets into the state secondary highway system, effective January 1, 2007. Currently, the state code requires VDOT to accept into the Commonwealth’s secondary system any new roads that meet state standards, with the result that Virginia has added approximately 1,500 center-lane miles to its secondary road system over the past 10 years, adding considerably to the state’s roadway maintenance budget. The thinking is to make localities responsible for maintaining the streets in subdivision developments that they approve.

These are refreshing ideas but the devil is in the details. That’s all I’ll say for now. I’ll post again in the future when I’ve had a chance to absorb these ideas and assimilate feedback. To read the Speaker’s press release with full details, click here.

Two weeks ago I wrote a column (“The Dog that Didn’t Bark“) about Philip Shucet’s rethinking of the politics of transportation. While emphasizing that he hadn’t given up his long-term goal of increasing taxes by some $1 billion a year, the former VDOT commissioner had concluded that it might make more sense for now to seek common ground with low-tax Republicans in the House of Delegates.

It turns out that Shucet’s tactical retreat was not well received by his buddies in the Axis of Taxes. Margaret Edds with the Virginian-Pilot has written a follow-up story. She writes:

Stunned longtime allies manned telephones and computers to ask, had the former commissioner gone over to the other side? The reaction, Shucet said, was a combination of irate calls and stone silence.

In a long e-mail last week, Shucet reassured associates that he was not “doing my best to become the new Benedict Arnold … I’m still the same Philip. (At least I hope so!)”

The reaction to the Shucet column is very telling. I made it plain in the second paragraph and repeatedly lower in my column that Shucet still believes that tax increases are needed. But the mere willingness to consider alternatives was enough, it seems, to label him a heretic. That goes to the difference between Shucet and so many others who lobby for higher taxes: He acknowledges that higher taxes are only a partial solution — for them it’s the only solution.

Among the key figures in the Axis of Taxes, Shucet is the only one, to my knowledge, who has made a meaningful effort to articulate remedies other than tax-and-build. (See his penetrating Oct. 20, 2005 letter to the Senate leadership.) Sadly, Shucet’s associates seem interested mainly in his endorsement of higher taxes, not his recommendations for reform.

Also, Edds served up this juicy nugget:

After heavy courting from Democrats and some from moderate Republicans, he’s decided against running for the General Assembly himself anytime soon.

His parents, ages 88 and 96, have just moved in with the family. He’s able to be home regularly at night for the first time in years. “I did give it more than scant consideration, and it’s just not something I see myself doing,” he said.

I can’t blame him one bit.

The latest blogs to be added to the Bacon’s Rebellion blog roll:

Barticles, an exceptionally erudite blog maintained by Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Barton Hinkle.

Coalition for Hanover’s Future, blog maintained by a coalition of citizens representing several organizations dedicated to protecting and preserving the land, history, and environment of Hanover County.

Southwest by Southeast, the blogged musings of a Southwest Virginia conservative living in Southeastern Virginia.

The House of Delegates has unveiled a dramatic package of land use reforms, and I’ve been so busy publishing the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine this morning that I haven’t had time to get to it. I will endeavor to do so this afternoon. In the meantime, I would plug a worthy legislative package submitted by Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton.

Saxman’s bills would encourage the U.S. Department of Transportation to establish a congestion-pricing demonstration project in Virginia. He would offset the congestion tolls by eliminating the gasoline tax in the transportation corridor covered by the tolls for the length of the project, and he would require a referendum within 12 to 18 months to allow citizens to scrap the tolls or make them permanent.

Unlike other tolls, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the primary purpose of congestion pricing is not to raise more money, although it would do that. The purpose is (a) to encourage motorists to use other transportation modes, shift their travel times or telecommute, thus reducing demand, and (b) to allow freeways to operate at optimal traffic levels thus increasing rush-hour capacity.

Embracing congestion-pricing tolls for all congested thoroughfares is the quickest, most cost-efficient thing that Virginia can do to ameliorate traffic congestion. The impact would be felt within a matter of months after implementation, as compared to the years or decades it would take for new road construction to take effect — assuming that new road construction is really the answer at all.

Indeed, I would argue that congestion tolls are the holy grail of the Axis of Taxes: a reliable and sustainable transportation funding source. The beauty of congestion pricing tolls is that they automatically adjust in response to market demand: If congestion gets worse, the tolls go up, and so do revenues for new transportation improvements. If congestion diminishes, the tolls go down. Of course, you can’t say that about new taxes passed by the General Assembly. Taxes only go up.

Finally, I would suggest that congestion pricing is an indispensable complement to land use reform. By increasing the cost of driving long distances on gridlocked arteries, congestion tolls would encourage people to move to well-integrated communities where they can live, work, shop, play and worship without hitting the highways. Shifting market demand would encourage developers to build those kind of communities, and developers would pressure local governments to approve them. Virginia doesn’t need to resort to social engineering to achieve more efficient settlement patterns.

I explore those issues in “The Swedish Solution.” For you policy wonks who want to deep-dive into the details, read “A Congestion Pricing Primer.” The Department of Transportation provides cogent answers to my questions about the economics of congestion pricing and the availability of federal funds for a demonstration project in Virginia.

The Sept. 25, 2006, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion has been published. You can view it here. Not only can you read this week’s punditry and profundity, you can peruse our archives. Why not subscribe, and get the e-zine sent directly to your in-box?

Today’s columns include:

The Swedish Solution
If congestion pricing works in Sweden, why not in Virginia? Tolls that vary by congestion levels could dampen demand for added roadway capacity while raising new revenue.
by James A. Bacon

A Congestion Pricing Primer
Answers? You want answers? I asked the U.S. Department of Transportation about its congestion-pricing policies. The answers were so good I had to reproduce them whole.
by James A. Bacon

Future Still Shocking
In our age of accelerating change, some institutions adapt more quickly than others. Insights from the Tofflers’ new book help explain the challenges facing Virginia.
by Doug Koelemay

Jackpot Winner
Americans are like the overweight Lotto winner who squanders his winnings. The discovery of oil deep in the Gulf of Mexico will do little to halt the coming energy crash.
by EM Risse

A New Transportation Equation
Virginia once led the nation in seeking private- sector solutions for transportation problems. We will have a chance in few days to burnish our tarnished capitalistic credentials.
by Geoffrey Segal

Pouring Water on Sand
Virginia legislators propose increasing subsidies for the Washington Metro — an unaccountable organization plagued by operational blunders and financial mismanagement.
by Phil Rodokanakis

No Regional Goverment!
If you like the idea of taxation without representation… if you’re looking to enrich your cronies without public oversight… you’ll love the idea of regional government.
by James Atticus Bowden

Who’s Watching the Richmond Media?
Part I: Community weeklies diverge on news council idea.
by Conaway Haskins

Who’s Watching the Richmond Media?
Part II: Blogs to the Rescue?
by Conaway Haskins

The Five-Legged Dog
Asserting that Rail to Dulles is an effective solution to Northern Virginia’s transportation problems does not make it so. The project is broken, and it’s time to re-think mobility solutions for the Dulles corridor.
by William Vincent

The Bridal Path to Nowhere
How Virginia can beat its traffic woes: Stop wasting money on dumb projects, establish performance measures and don’t give municipalities more power over land use!
by Ron Utt

Nice & Curious Questions
A Heartbeat Away: Vice Presidents from Virginia
by Edwin S. Clay III and Patricia Bangs

What the legislators are missing, or not, is this paragraph in bills for Hampton Roads Regional Governments:

“To the extent funds are made available to the Authority to do so, to employ employees, agents, advisors, and consultants, including WITHOUT LIMITATION, attorneys, financial advisors, engineers, and technical advisors, and, the provision of any other law to the contrary notwithstanding, to determine their duties and compensation.”

Don’t give that power to a council of city and county officials and some reps from the General Assembly.

Of course, this is precisely what the politicians want.

You can take Del. Leo Waldrup’s Bridge and Tunnel Authority and strip out this paragraph. Have the Bridge and Tunnel Authority collect money and decide what big projects to do, but give the executive function to adminster, manageand oversight to VDOT and the Governor.

I spoke to a very Conservative delegate this weekend. The delegate didn’t get the idea that the authority needed to be limited. Maybe I didn’t say it clearly enough.

It looks bad. Republicans are going to create a new level of unelected, unaccountable government for Hampton Roads. They may not do in the House Finance Committee, but they will roll in the Conference because they don’t understand what they are doing, or cynically, they understand exactly what they are doing.

The voters be damned. Our votes in ’98 and ’02 (and some in 05 against Kilgore’s Regional Governments) were meaningless when they come between politicians and much more power.