Sen. John Chichester, R-Northumberland, has been eerily quiet the past few months. While the House of Delegates has unveiled one new transportation initiative after another, the powerful chairman of the Senate finance committee has said very little. But in a column published today in the Free Lance-Star, he has finally laid out his thinking.
The bottom line: Nothing’s changed. His top priority is creating “a reliable and sustainable funding source ” for transportation — in other words, raising taxes. He comes across as a philosophical fossil, his views etched in stone, impermeable to new thinking.
While Chichester does give lip service to the goal of “squeez[ing] as much as we can out of every transportation dollar,” his heart isn’t in it. He writes:
During its 2006 session, the General Assembly made progress on the reform front. We passed laws that better connect land-use and transportation planning; laws that require performance measures to be used to reduce traffic congestion and improve traffic safety; and laws that promote private investment through partnering opportunities. We do not need more legislation to do what has already been done.
That’s it. Nothing more needs to be done. The House has introduced far-reaching VDOT reform proposals and is preparing to roll out a sweeping land use reform package early next week, but Chichester has written them off as inconsequential. He doesn’t simply disagree with the House recommendations, he acts as if they do not exist.
Furthermore, Chichester doesn’t see much good coming from privatization initiatives. He totally mischaracterizes the thrust of the House platform:
Those same people say the solution is simple — just attract more private capital to our transportation system. If that means selling a road that already has been paid for by taxpayers to a private entity so taxpayers have the pleasure of paying a second time, I call that double taxation. Some prefer to call it private enterprise.
That’s a straw man. The House privatization initiative does not call for selling roads. It calls for creating a “a detailed Action Plan to increase the role of the private sector in the development of transportation projects in Virginia as well as the use of public-private partnerships.” That doesn’t preclude selling existing roads but the obvious thrust is to aggressively identify opportunities to invest in new construction.
Chichester goes on: “Those same people say we can solve all of our problems by outsourcing more to the private sector. That’s well and good, but it ignores the reality that we already outsource more than 70 percent of road maintenance and more than 90 percent of new construction.”
Balderdash, no one says that privatization can “solve all our problems.” Privatization advocates say that outsourcing is only one piece of a comprehensive solution. Furthermore, Chichester fails to draw a distinction between “outsourcing” as currently practiced — hiring private contractors to handle piece-meal jobs — and the kind of outsourcing that reform advocates call for. With genuine outsourcing, VDOT would contract with private companies to manage maintenance for defined stretches of roadway over several years. VDOT would set performance standards and the contractor would accept the financial risk for failing to meet those standards.
As in the past, Chichester has provided no indication that he understands the connection between land use and transportation — that scattered, disconnected, low density development generates longer and more frequent automobile trips than do more efficient patterns of urban design. He never mentions telework or telecommuting. He never mentions congestion pricing. He never mentions Intelligent Transportation Systems. He never mentions Transportation Demand Management.
It is scary: The most powerful man in the state senate embodies a transportation philosophy that seems frozen in the amber of the 1970s: Tax, spend, build — and trust the politicians to get it all right.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has stated that, while he also wants to raise taxes, he is willing to work with the House to find common ground. Unfortunately, Chichester has made it very clear that he sees no common ground. We can only hope that Senate Democrats and a handful of low-tax Republicans will craft a Senate majority willing to follow the Governor’s lead in working with the House.
