The following was submitted by Ron Utt of the Heritage Foundation and the Virginia Institute for Public Policy:
As the state legislature convenes in Richmond this June in a special session to revise Virginia’s recently enacted surface transportation program, a number of elected officials – ranging from the legislature’s Republican caucus to the Attorney General – have recommended that the state conduct an independent, comprehensive performance audit of the state’s transportation operation to determine areas of deficiency, improve program management, set clear goals and measures of accountability, and develop a plan to reduce traffic congestion. Such a performance audit was completed in Washington state in 2007, and the Idaho legislature is contracting with private consulting firms to conduct a similar audit in 2008.
Among the many findings from Washington’s independent performance audit were problems related to the large number of overlapping government bodies that had some responsibility – and some portion of the resources — for some facet of the state’s (or region’s) transportation policy. This balkanized system of responsibility, in turn, made it difficult to devote the combined resources of government to solving transportation problems, coordinate responses, or – most importantly — to hold any of these many public entities accountable for successes and failures.
In the event that Virginia agrees to conduct its own independent performance audit of the state’s transportation system, the auditors will quickly discover a mother lode of more than a dozen overlapping, costly, and redundant government transportation bureaucracies spending vast sums of taxpayer money in pursuit of contradictory – and often counterproductive — transportation policies and projects. Indeed, Northern Virginia may very well have the most confusing and redundant collection of transportation bureaucracies in the Nation.
A good place to start is with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and the region’s metropolitan planning organization – the National Capital Regional Transportation Planning Board (TPB). Members of the Board (and overseers) include five northern Virginia counties and five incorporated cities, as well as the District of Columbia, three Maryland Counties, and six Maryland pseudo-cities. In addition to these two region-wide bureaucracies, each of the five Virgina counties and five cities may embark upon some of their own transportation policies and initiatives.
Serving as ex-officio member on the TPB are three Federal agencies — the National Park Service, the Federal Transit Administration, and the Federal Highway Administration – and also the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA). Although MWAA has no experience in surface transportation issues, it recently became a major player in NoVA transportation policy when it assumed responsibility for building the Dulles Rail project.
Recently added to this mix is the state government created and empowered (and then Supreme Court disempowered) Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA), whose member jurisdictions are the same as those Virginia entities serving on the TPB. This new transit-oriented focus will be supplemented by the ongoing work of three other Virginia government entities with some responsibility for transit: the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, the Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commission and the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation. The first two are responsible for operating and funding the Virginia Railway Express (VRE).
I know that this is getting confusing, but, unfortunately, there are still a few more costly bureaucracies floundering around the state and the region, and operating their own competing transportation fiefdoms. Among them is one of the biggest, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), which operates the Metro and the companion bus system. In the original H 3202, spending priority on taxes raised is to satisfy any debt service obligations incurred by the new NVTA, while each year the VRE and WMATA would have had first claim on the next $75 million raised through H 3202’s unconstitutional tax scheme. Added to this steaming bureaucratic brew is the Northern Virginia Regional Commission, and the biggest player of all – the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT).
Maybe this regional broth of bureaucrats makes sense, but I doubt it, and a perfect project for the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee (JLARC) and/0r the Auditor of Public Accounts (APA) would be to conduct a comprehensive financial audit to identify what it is that each of these taxpayer funded entities does, determine how much in administrative costs is required to keep them in operation, and provide an inventory of all personnel, as well as their salary and benefit packages. Such information would be a valuable supplement and assist to the independent performance audit that Virginia should conduct, and would also serve to inform taxpayers of the service tradeoffs incurred by big bureaucracies. For example, if the average Virginia pot hole costs $200 to fix, and if the average bureaucrat in any of the above named entities earns $80,000 per annum, then the public cost of each redundant bureaucrat represents 400 unfilled pot holes on Virginia roads. Think about it.
(Cross-posted at Tertium Quids)
