The House Counties, Cities and Towns Committee decided to defer action on land use legislation championed by House Speaker William J. Howell and other Republicans in favor of studying the proposals. “You’re talking about drastic changes,” said Del. Riley Ingram, R-Hopewell, the committee chairman.
According to Chelyen Davis with the Free Lance-Star, Ingram said he’d appoint an ad hoc committee to study the issues, and have the bill patrons reintroduce their legislation for the 2007 session that starts in January.
One of the bills would establish “urban transportation districts” that would allow localities to take over responsibility and funding for maintaining secondary roads. The other would require counties to set up “urban development areas” where they would channel growth.
In one of the main issues that surfaced, according to Davis, Democrats contended that “the state doesn’t provide enough money to maintain the roads anyway, and that localities would find they were saddled with all the responsibility and not enough funding.” Said Del. Kris Amundson, D-Fairfax: “It’s clearly insufficient. What you’re doing is passing on more responsibility than money.”
If the bill would simply fob off responsibility for road maintenance to local government without providing the resources to do the job, then it’s a bad bill. But I’m not certain that the Democratic objections are based in fact. For starters, it’s incorrect to say that “the state doesn’t provide enough money to maintain the roads anyway.” Au contraire, the state prioritizes maintenance spending. Maintenance spending gets first dibs on transportation dollars. That’s why, with escalating maintenance expenses, money for new construction is running out.
A more interesting objection was this: that delegating authority to local governments would lead to a patchwork of maintenance standards across the state. But no one has had a problem with allowing cities and two counties (Henrico and Arlington) to maintain their own roads since… since forever. If the standards are “patchwork,” no one has expressed a problem about them before.
