Sean Connaughton. Photo credit: Lorton Patch.
by James A. Bacon
Where does Gov. Bob McDonnell stand on the issue of devolving responsibility for secondary road maintenance to the counties? I’m not aware that the governor has staked out a formal position, but his transportation secretary, Sean Connaughton, gave some strong hints today about where he stands.
Two weeks ago, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted to increase the density of Tysons Corner by 7%, Connaughton volunteered in a free-ranging riff during a meeting of the Commonwealth Transportation Board this afternoon. When informed that the cost of building the transportation infrastructure to serve that density would cost $1 billion, he continued, the county response was, “It’s the state’s responsibility.” In effect, he was saying — at least, this is what I read into his remarks — that the system that separates responsibility for land use and transportation is broken.
Fairfax County’s actions have been replicated on a smaller scale endlessly across Virginia. County boards of supervisors make major land use decisions knowing that they can pass the buck for road improvements to the state. That’s the main reason the General Assembly passed legislation a few years ago allowing counties to take over responsibility for their secondary roads. So far, every county has balked at taking on the obligation, usually on the grounds that they distrusted the ability of Virginia Department of Transportation to pay them enough to make it worth their while. (Cities, towns and the counties of Arlington and Henrico maintain their own road systems in an arrangement that dates back, with minor modifications to 1932.)
Click on chart for more legible image.
The counties’ skepticism was driven home in a survey of county officials recently conducted by VDOT. Although county officials assign a far higher priority to maintenance over new construction, only a small minority are interested in taking over maintenance themselves. The number of positive responses did increase measurably (see chart) on the condition that the state provided additional resources.
“Senator [Harry] Byrd was looking at a world of country roads” during the Great Depression when he crafted the road-maintenance responsibilities between cities, counties and the state, Connaughton said. But the situation is very different today. Three of the top ten wealthiest jurisdictions in the country are located in Northern Virginia. “We pave their cul de sacs,” he said. By contrast, the town of Dumphries in Prince William County is one of the poorest jurisdictions in the region. “They have to maintain their own roads.”
(While Dumphries does pave its own roads, the state distributes maintenance dollars to offset the cost — I don’t think the secretary meant to imply otherwise.)
Connaughton framed the larger issue this way: Should the state accept Fairfax County cul de sacs into the state secondary road system, or should the commonwealth focus on primary roads? Just because Virginia has done things the same way for nearly 80 years, he seemed to say, is no reason to continue doing it. “There’s a lot of crazy stuff that no one’s had the courage to look at.”
Sounding very much unlike a former Northern Virginia politician — he previously served as chairman of the Prince William County board of supervisors — Connaughton dismissed the conventional wisdom that Northern Virginia doesn’t get its fair share of transportation revenues. He can’t speak for other areas of government, he said, but when it comes to transportation funding, “the rest of the state is subsidizing Northern Virginia.”
When it costs $11 billion just to add an extra lane to Interstate 81, he said, addressing a topic raised earlier in the meeting, the state doesn’t have enough money to fulfill everybody’s wish list. “It’s more than just a revenue issue now,” he said. “It’s about roles and responsibilities.”
