Monthly Archives: December 2006

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.)

“Walkable” communities are the hot concept in real estate development these days. Certain elements are necessary for building them. The communities must contain a finely grained mix of land uses — houses, shops, offices, civic buildings — within walkable distances of each other. These land uses must be integrated with one another, not separated by physical and psychological barriers. And the streetscapes must invite pedestrian activity.

There is an art to designing inviting streetscapes. There’s a lot more to it than installing brick sidewalks and paving fancy crosswalks. Buildings should abut the sidewalk, and they should present a varied and visually interesting face to the street. There should be on-street parking, with parked cars acting as a barrier between vehicles on the street and pedestrians on the sidewalk. And local streets, as opposed to arterial or collector roads, should be designed for slow driving speeds.

How do you slow traffic speeds? You can post speed limit signs for 20 miles per hour, but if the street is designed to accommodate 40 miles per hour, you’re going to find a lot of people ignoring the speed limit. The key, according to the New Urbanists, is narrow streets. When streets are narrow and corners are tight, people have no choice but to slow down.

People living in residential neighborhoods prefer slow traffic: They don’t like the idea of their children playing in the streets and getting flattened by zooming cars. That’s why we have so many cul de sacs — dead-end configurations that prevent motorists from hauling butt through the neighborhoods on streets so wide that they could host the Daytona 500. But cul de sacs are not walkable. The only people you see walking in cul-de-sac subdivisions are getting their daily exercise. They aren’t using the streets as a means to actually get anywhere. Neighborhoods built around cul de sac streets rule out walking as a transportation mode, rely upon bottleneck-prone collector roads for access, and hard-wire the region for traffic congestion.

As Virginia seeks solutions to traffic congestion, why don’t we encourage developers to build neighborhoods with narrow streets instead of subdivisions served by dead-end mini-freeways? Short answer: Because of fire department regulations. Narrow streets supposedly make it more difficult for monster fire trucks to gain access to houses on those streets.

New Urbanists insist that there are ways to design around the problem. But they raise a more fundamental issue: When it comes to public safety today, what’s the bigger problem — people dying in fires, or people getting killed in automobile accidents? Traffic fatalities are the larger problem, and the desire of fire-fighting professionals to rush around in bigger, flashier fire trucks should not trump the design of safer streets.

The design-by-fire-truck issue surfaced recently in Virginia during a charrette for Tree Hill, a proposed New Urbanist development south of Richmond. In my latest column, “Design by Fire Truck,” I describe New Urbanist guru Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk negotiating with Henrico County deputy Fire Marshal David Seay for some flexibility in the application of the rules. Once again, we demonstrate the point that our problem in Virginia is not a failure to give local government sufficient regulatory power — it’s the misapplication of the power they already have.

(Photo credit: VA Fire News.com)

The December 18, 2006, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine has been published. You can view today’s edition in its entirety here. Make sure you don’t miss a single issue — subscribe for free here.

Here are today’s columns:

Design by Fire Truck
Why can’t developers today create walkable communities like the small towns of the 1920s? Go ask your fire marshal.
by James A. Bacon

Spirit of History
The family stories we all share add up to the real history of our communities. It took 83-year-old Jac Walker of Franconia to show us how.
by Doug Koelemay

Neighborhood Values
If you want to promote family values, dispense with cultural wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage and focus on creating supportive dooryards and neighborhoods.
by EM Risse

Road Map
There is no need for legislative gridlock in Virginia. Two new publications outline priorities and detail solutions that a consensus can build around.
by Michael Thompson

Writing Rightly
I am driven to write — partly as a form of self expression, but mostly in defense of values threatened by secular humanists and totalitarian jihadists.
by James Atticus Bowden

Can’t We All Just Get Along?
GOP leaders want to paper over philosophical divides in pursuit of power. But they miss the fact that electoral victories are achieved only through visionary policies and strong leadership.
by Phil Rodokanakis

Nice & Curious Questions
Virginia’s Alma Maters: Halls of Public Ivy in the Old Dominion
by Edwin S. Clay III and Patricia Bangs

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when most of the region we call “Northern Virginia” was like the rest of Virginia. Once upon a time, Fairfax County was known for its dairy farms. Once upon a time, people referred to the Rest of Virginia as “south of the Occoquan.” Today, the Washington metro area has leap-frogged past the Occoquan — and even past the Rappahannock.

Now we can contemplate the time when the Washington metro area subsumes the Richmond region. In an op-ed piece published today in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Robert Land and Chris Nelson, co-directors of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech in Alexandria, suggest that the 2010 Census could find, based on commuting patterns, that the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan statistical area qualifies as the Washington-Baltimore-Richmond MSA. They write:

With growth in the booming Washington region surging south to Richmond, it appears that D.C. may soon have a new metropolitan partner. Consider recent growth trends in Carolina [County], about halfway between D.C. and Richmond. In 2000, a quarter of its workers commuted north to the Washington region while a slightly larger percentage headed south to the Richmond metropolitan area. According to the Census, if metropolitan areas share a significant proportion of workers, they may form a combined metro area.

Land and Nelson say that this emerging “megalopolis,” which they refer to as the “Chesapeake metropolitan area,” now contains 10 million people and could surpass 15 million by 2040.

Egads. I grew up in northwestern Washington, D.C. After graduating from the University of Virginia, though, I never had the slightest temptation to go back. Settling in Richmond, where I’ve lived for 20 years now, I always considered Washington as a psychologically distant universe. But those days are over, it appears. It looks like Washington has caught up with me.

After the latest round of press releases and media coverage, the transportation debate is still being framed purely as a budgetary issue: How much money needs to be injected into Virginia’s failing transportation system and where should it come from: General Fund budget surpluses or new, dedicated taxes?

The House Republican leadership fed that perception yesterday by criticizing Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s proposal to devote $500 million in one-time surplus revenues to transportation as too little, too late. House leaders reiterated their support for improved VDOT performance and for land use reforms, but they offered nothing new and the remarks were totally ignored in the press coverage.

Washington Post: “Kaine to Seek $500 Million in Bid to Alleviate VA’s Traffic Ills”
Times-Dispatch: “Transit Proposals Offered in Gov. Kaine’s Budget”
Virginian-Pilot: “Kaine adds $500 Million for transportation”
Free Lance-Star: “Kaine Wants $500 Million for Transportation”
Roanoke Times: “Transportation up for Debate”

So far, House initiatives to restructure state transportation and land use have generated zero interest in the news media. The meta-narrative has been well established: It’s all about new revenue. By arguing that Kaine isn’t spending enough of the General Fund surplus, the House only reinforces that perception.

The House does plan to introduce legislation amounting to the biggest overhaul in transportation and land use in 50 years — a veritable revolution in the governance structure. If the past is prologue, the capital press corps will give it footnote treatment. Assuming House Speaker William J. Howell and House Transportation Committee Chair Leo Wardrup want to line up public support for their reform proposals, which they’ll need if they want to pass their reforms, they have to change the terms of debate. They have to create a new meta-narrative around which a lazy, uninquisitive press corps can organize its stories.

Conservative, low-tax Republicans can’t out-spend Democrats and the “pragmatic” wing of the Republican Party. They will lose that debate every time. They have to re-cast the debate. The issue isn’t how much money to spend, it’s how the money is spent. The issue is creating a funding system in which people pay for transportation in direct proportion to which they use it. The issue is adapting a 1930s-vintage transportation system and a 1950s-era land use system for the 21st century. Unless the House can change the meta-narrative, it will lose the debate — if not in 2007 General Assembly session, then in the 2007 electoral campaign.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s proposal to steer $500 million in General Fund surplus revenues into transportation projects is too little and too late, charged the Republican leadership of the House of Delegates. (Read the House press release here.)

Too little: The Governor proposed dedicating only $161 million of the anticipated $475-$550 million surplus — about one third — as opposed to the House recommendation for at least one half, or $250 million. Added House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford: “It is especially disappointing that the Governor attempted to characterize the $339 million already designated by the General Assembly for transportation as new funding.”

Too late: Said Del. Leo Wardrup, R-Virginia Beach, chairman of the House transportation committee: “We could already have started most of these projects if the Governor and his allies hadn’t obstructed our efforts to fund them earlier this year. Now, these projects are likely to cost more and won’t be finished as soon.”

Wardrup reiterated the House call for using the state’s ample bonding capacity to borrow funds to accelerate road construction. He offered a new justification for borrowing money, which Democrats had derided as putting state bills on a credit card. The bonding initiative, which would allow the state to build projects now, would provide a “hedge” against inflationary cost increases.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine still wants to increase taxes for transportation, but until he can do so, he’s willing to spend funds from Virginia’s bounteous General Fund budget surplus on road and transit projects. Yesterday, he outlined plans for spending $500 million in General Fund surpluss on a mix of road, transit and technology projects. (Read the press release here.)

Among the justifications he cited was a $112 million “revenue reductions” for the current biennium. “Some major mandates and other cost increases faced by transportation providers include: the continued growth in the cost of highway maintenance; the federal REAL ID program for driver licenses; increased construction costs due to spiking commodity prices; and salary increases for state employees.” (Sounds like a mix of mandates and inflation-driven costs, not “revenue reduction,” but the larger point is well taken: It’s less money for construction and capital spending.)

The Governor’s priorities for one-time expenditures include:

• $305 million to support PPTA and design-build projects on the Capital Beltway (HOT lanes), the Hillsville Bypass on Route 58, the I-64/I-264 interchange, and Route 50 in Fairfax and Loudoun counties;
• $125 million to increase passenger rail along I-95 and take more truck traffic off of I-81, and bring new railcars to the Metro, VRE and Norfolk light rail systems, and buses to other public transit systems statewide;
• $50 million to complete the route 164 rail relocation in South Hampton Roads and to begin the planning and engineering for the Craney Island expansion, and;
• $20 million ($10 million for Hampton Roads and $10 million for Northern Virginia) to create a technology innovation grant, providing incentives for ideas that reduce congestion or increase transportation options in the most congested regions of the Commonwealth.

Bobbie Kilberg, president of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, elaborated upon the technology grants:

Leveraging private sector technology-based transportation solutions, as Governor Kaine has proposed, is a critical step to relieve traffic congestion and to provide Northern Virginia commuters with more information, choice, predictability and safety. … Technology-based solutions will better inform commuters of real time traffic conditions and allow commuters to consider alternatives, such as telework and mass transit.

The Virginian-Pilot is conducting an interesting experiment: converting its letters to the editor into blog posts that allow other readers to comment. So far, the reader interaction has been meager. That may change, and I hope it will.

If the idea fails to take off despite the massive readership that the Pilot can drive to the blog, here’s my take on why: Letters to the Editor are, by their nature, extremely diverse in their viewpoints, their tone and their subject matter. A Letters blog does not have a thematic focus, and it cannot develop an editorial voice that people can respond to, either positively or negatively.

Virginian-Pilot columnists are much more likely, I would suspect, to generate a following and interaction with readers than the Letters section. Succeed or fail, the Pilot deserves credit for trying something new.

Two pieces of interest today on the topic of education.

First piece: The Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit group focused on school reform, has questioned the rigor of Virginia’s Standards of Quality exams, according to the Virginian-Pilot.

Among eighth-graders who took the state Standards of Learning math test in 2005, 81 percent were either “proficient” or “advanced.” By comparison, 33 percent of Virginia eighth-graders who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress that year scored “proficient” or “advanced.”

Similar findings applied to fifth graders. Bottom line, we think our schools are doing an adequate job — but maybe they’re not.

Second piece: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg published a column (subscribers only) in the Wall Street Journal comparing America’s education system to the automobile industry of the 1970s: “stuck in a flabby, inefficient, outdated production model driven by the needs of employees rather than consumers.”

The problem, he says, is not that America doesn’t spend enough money. “We spend enormous amounts, far more than any other nation. But we’re not getting a sufficient return on our investment.”

Bloomberg blames bureacracies that lack clear lines of accountability, tolerating mediocrity and failure and failing to reward excellence. He blames lifetime tenure for school teachers, rewarding them for longevity, not performance. He blames the failure to help struggling students in early years, when costs are lower, and then paying for ineffective remediation programs in later years, when costs are higher. He blames funding inequalities between school districts that short-change minorities.

What schools need, Bloomberg says, is “a top-to-bottom rethinking…. one that insists on a perfomance-based culture of accountability that is oriented around children, not bureaucracies.” He calls for higher teacher salaries to attract the best and brightest, upholding high standards and ending social promotion, and investing in early childhood development.

Bloomberg’s emphasis on early childhood education is reminiscent of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s proposal to push universal pre-K in Virginia. While I question the benefits of such a plan, I remain open to persuasion and, indeed, hope to address the Kaine administration’s arguments for universal pre-K in some depth in the not-too-distant future. But I am unalterably opposed to blindly dumping mo’ money into a system that is already awash in funds and exacting no institutional change whatsoever. Virginia has many dedicated teachers and administrators but the system is highly bureaucratic and inefficient.

Any injection of more money into the system must be accompanied by greater accountability and institutional reform. Otherwise, we’re squandering billions of dollars. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure that out.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine will introduce legislation $250 million in bonds to upgrade 89 municipal sewage treatment plants with the goal of slashing nutrients released into the Chesapeake Bay. Said Kaine in a prepared statement today: “Through this partnership with our local governments, we will be able to accomplish with this $250 million bond package what few have thought possible: we will have the resources to meet the sewage treatment plant discharge requirements of the Chesapeake Bay Agreement.”

House Republicans aren’t real happy about it. In a counter press release, House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, reiterated the Republicans’ support for a half billion dollars in Clean-the-Bay initiatives. What frosts him is the fact that Gov. Kaine is willing to tap the state’s ample debt capacity to upgrade sewage treatment plants — but not roads.

Said Howell: “We are left scratching our heads and wondering why he has selectively chosen to use 21st Century financing tools for this priority but has actively opposed our efforts to take advantage of this proven solution to address transportation.”

Added House Majority Whip M. Kirkland Cox, R-Colonial Heights: “Not less than three months ago, the Governor’s office cynically compared House Republicans’ use of bonding to address a long-term problem to using one credit card to pay off another. Now, he’s applying that same financing tool as part of the solution on Bay cleanup.”

Howell and Cox make a legitimate point. Gov. Kaine and his fellow Democrats don’t have an aversion to using debt, as the Governor has just demonstrated. Their problem is with using debt for transportation as an alternative to raising taxes. Their show of waving their credit cards on the General Assembly floor was nothing more than a cynical photo op for the benefit of a compliant news media.

Personally, I have no philosophical objection to the state issuing long-term debt as long as it can be done while maintaining a AAA bond rating. The reason I oppose issuing debt for roads at this time is that I am not convinced the money will be well spent. The House Republicans have some good ideas for restructuring the state transportation system — but I’d like to see them enacted before the state starts cranking up the spending machine, whether through debt or taxes.

The word “density” means different things to different people. To some, it conjures images of a dystopic, skyscraper-ridden Manhattan. To others it evokes a crowded, jostling K Street in Washington, D.C. To developer Ted Smart, it means a few blocks of three- and four-story buildings clustered around a Virginia Railway Express station in Stafford County.

For many Stafford residents, it appears, Smart’s vision for a walkable, mixed-use community in the middle of the ‘burbs is frightening. As Bob Burke documents in his story, “The Curse of the ‘D’ Word,” Smart is running into a lot of local resistance to the proposal on the grounds that the density would create too much congestion.

It is imperative that people learn to distinguish between impact of density on local traffic patterns and its impact on regional congestion. Yes, Smart’s Leeland Station would create more localized congestion than would exist on the 626-space parking lot that sits there now. But it would create less congestion regionally than the alternative: sprawling, by-right development. People living in Leeland Station would take fewer, shorter car trips, putting less strain on Stafford County’s road network, than would a comparable number of households living in cul-de-sac subdivisions and five-acre farmettes.

How do we know this? First of all, the community would be designed to provide maximum access to the VRE train station — taking commuters off Stafford’s traffic-clogged roads during rush hour, the time that matters most. Secondly, Leeland Station residents would find that many of their daily needs — drug stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, child care, video stores, whatever — would be located within a very short distance. Even if they were too lazy to walk, the drive would be extremely short. Such trips would not stress the county’s secondary road network. Thirdly, Smart’s plan would efficiently accommodate bus service, which cul de sac and farmettes cannot.

A second point: Smart is willing to provide the county $37 million in proffers and make $17 million in local road improvements on his own. How much proffer money will the county get from by-right development, which, by definition, requires no zoning approvals and no negotiation?

A third point: If Smart provides 1,673 dwelling units, that’s 1,673 fewer households living in scattered, disconnected, low-density locations where it’s impossible to walk anywhere, bicycle anywhere or serve by bus or light rail. Here’s the irony, Leeland residents will be OK with the “congestion” created in Leeland Station itself (a) because the community is designed to handle it, and (b) they want the urban-style amenities the project offers.

If other Stafford residents don’t like the “congested” atmosphere of Leeland station, with all those cars and people, guess what: They don’t have to go there! It’s not as if Leeland would transform the character of the entire county! No one will be taking away their precious cul de sacs and strip shopping centers. I just don’t see how anyone loses by approving Leeland Station. But I see everyone losing if it gets turned down.

A move by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to fully fund a three-percent pay raise for public school teachers and administrators generated the headlines in today’s newspapers, but it isn’t likely to prove terribly controversial. The General Assembly had already recommended the three-percent raise but just hadn’t funded it. With an anticipated $500 million surplus anticipated next year, lawmakers shouldn’t have much trouble finding the $64 million needed.

Of greater interest are Gov. Kaine’s early childhood initiatives, as reported by Michael Hardy with the Times-Dispatch:

• Allocate $4.1 million to provide assistance for eligible first- and second-graders who are having trouble reading.
• Add $3.9 million to extend the algebra readiness program to sixth-graders.
• Earmark $4.6 million for new pilot programs to gauge implementation practices for expanding current pre-kindergarten through public-private partnerships.

I don’t have any problem with the initiatives per se. I just don’t see why they can’t be funded out of the existing K-12 budget. It’s not as if schools have been getting short-shrifted. The FY 2005 budget contained $4.7 billion in state aid to public education. The FY 2008 budget will contain $5.9 billion — an increase of 25.5 percent in four years.

The problem, I suspect, lies in the inflexibility of the state-aid-to-public-education formula and the Standards of Quality that drive it. The SOQs, as I have argued on this blog before, are a mindless automoton that drives education spending ever higher, redistributing massive wealth from affluent school districts to poor ones, and making it difficult to reallocate resources within school budgets to new priorities. End result: To do anything new, as the Governor wants, requires supplemental funds.