The Hampton Roads Transportation Authority approved yesterday an array of new regional taxes designed to raise some $175 million a year, but delayed implementation to give the General Assembly time to come up with a financing package that, in the words of James City County Board Chairman John J. McGlennon, “is spread more evenly among a broader section of the public.”
“The mix of fees was not right and we hope to rationalize them,” McGlennon said at the Authority meeting in Chesapeake, reports Tom Holden with the Virginian-Pilot.
Good luck. The General Assembly isn’t going to do any better a second time around. The one logical solution — devise a system in which the people who pay for transportation improvements are the same as those who use and/or benefit from them — is the one solution that politicians and citizen activists of all stripes seem to avoid at all costs. People want the road improvements, they just want someone else to pay for them. However, it is impossible for the General Assembly to tax people to the tune of $175 million a year without anyone noticing.
The most promising development to come out of the HRTA meeting yesterday — and one totally overlooked by the accounts in the Virginian-Pilot, Daily-Press and Associated Press — is that the Authority may adopt a congestion-pricing strategy. Unfortunately, I have no details — know no more than what Reid Greenbaum reported in his comments in yesterday’s post, “Here, Take My Lint” — so I cannot elaborate at this time.
But speaking in generalities, as long as the Authority is imposing new tolls to pay for projects, it might as well utilize supply-and-demand principles to ration scarce highway capacity. A willingness to consider congestion pricing represents a huge step forward in regional thinking.
