The blogosphere strikes again, this time with an interview on Bearing Drift of Del. Leo Wardrup, R-Virginia Beach, on how the transportation debate is shaping up in the General Assembly.
A few highlights as transcribed in Bearing Drift:
Norman Leahy: Are you part of a “Rabid anti-tax wing”?
Delegate Wardrup: I’m part of the anti-tax wing, but I wouldn’t describe myself as rabid. Those that want more taxes are rabid.
A laundry list of projects ain’t gonna happen. Not enough money to do what everyone wants to do….
We simply cannot pave our way out of the problem; we could pave the potomac and we couldn’t solve the problem up there. hot lanes, medians, beltway use would be helpful. in NOVA, if we build it, they will come….
I found this interesting, Wardrup endorsing the concept of congestion pricing:
Virginia is not the only one facing transportation crisis. We’re going to have to come to the point where we pay for operating vehicles during the peak hours…such as in London. We’re going to end up doing the same types of things, I think, eventually… in the congested areas….
And a point that I’ve been hammering on the past couple of weeks, on the press coverage of the transportation debate as a pure tax-and-spending issue:
The press doesn’t want to do their homework. “Show me the money” they say. They haven’t reported on a ton of legislation that is new and different. They just sit back and say what is being proposed in dollars and say that the House is paving the roads with school books, but what about all these increased revenues that we have accumulated from the surplus over the last two years.
And this:
I’ve been around govn’t too long. there is never enough money to meet the needs of government and the needy. Thats why we send people to make these hard decisions. But we are elected to make those decisions. Heck, raising taxes is the easy way.
