The House of Delegates has passed a package of 26 bills related to transportation and land use. Three will be held over for study and re-presented in next year’s session. The rest move to the Senate for consideration. It will be interesting to see which bills survive Senate scrutiny. Despite all the hoo-ha reported by the newspapers, many measures passed by lopsided margins.
There’s some good, bad and indifferent in the package. You won’t get much detail in the press accounts, though, so I have posted the House Speaker’s press release on the Bacon’s Rebellion website here. (I really, really wish he’d get a website and post his press releases so I could just link to them!)
The House leadership is touting the package as a bold leap forward. I would characterize it as a timid step forward — a step in the right direction, but partial and incomplete. Chris Saxman’s congestion-pricing bills (“The Swedish Solution“) aren’t included here. Among the more worthwhile measures:
- Instituting quantifiable congestion goals into the road-approval process
- Soliciting more private investment
- Privatizing more VDOT functions
- Allowing counties to assume control over maintenance of secondary roads
- Bigger penalties for chronic abusive drivers.
- Recategorizing VDOT roadways (primary, secondary, urban) based on functionality
- Limiting the acceptance of new subdivision streets into the state system
I’m intrigued by the concept of Urban Development Districts but want to know more about it. I’m also less than enthralled by the $2.44 billion funding package — for the same reasons I’m less than impressed with the Kaine/Senate proposals for permanent tax increases. The system is broken. Why waste any more money on it until we fix it? These proposals represent no more than a useful start.
What’s significant, to my mind, is not the legislation itself as much as the paradigm shift that’s occurring in the House. The House leadership has broken decisively from the old tax-spend-build mentality and has established good strong themes — change the way VDOT does business, reform land use — in their place. As an institution, the House is now ascending the learning curve. Hopefully, delegates will prove receptive to even more radical departures from Business As Usual in the future.
For all its warts, the House legislative package beats what came out of the Senate and the Governor’s Office — the same warmed over tax hike proposals that were defeated this spring. I had expected as much from the Senate, but I’m disappointed, given his conciliatory rhetoric, that Gov. Kaine has taken such a passive role in embracing change.
