Transportation Woes Are a Danger to State’s Future

Just two weeks from today, the 140 members of the General Assembly will hit the highways, heading back to the state Capitol in Richmond to tackle the commonwealth’s transportation crisis.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has called the Assembly back into session June 23 to take up a series of funding mechanisms to address long-term maintenance and construction needs for the state’s highway system and mass transit programs in Northern Virginia and Tidewater. Between a series of increased taxes on the sale of real estate and vehicles, a higher vehicle registration fee and a higher sales tax in Northern Virginia and Tidewater, $1 billion annually would be generated for maintenance, construction and other transportation programs.

In Richmond, however, there’s an old adage from days of yore that still holds true today: “The governor proposes; the General Assembly disposes.”

It’s the reality of Virginia politics in 2008 that with Republicans from the party’s rabidly anti-tax wing running the House of Delegates — folks like Speaker Bill Howell, Majority Leader Morgan Griffith and Del. Kirk Cox — and calling the shots, the chance of success is slim.

And that’s being optimistic.

Current estimates by planners in the Virginia Department of Transportation have the state spending all its available transportation money on maintenance by the middle of the next decade.

Think of the consequences, just here in Central Virginia, if that were to come to pass. No road widening projects, such as the work under way now on U.S. 221 in Forest. No U.S. 29 southern bypass to connect with the $220 million Madison Heights bypass, allowing interstate traffic to avoid the mess of Wards Road and opening up new parts of the region to economic development. No replacement of the aging bridges in Lynchburg or widening of highways to accommodate the phenomenal growth of Liberty University. Nothing … just a little bit of repaving here and some line-painting there.

And that’s just one little area of the state.

So-called “leaders” of the Assembly, such as Del. Griffith, don’t see that there’s a transportation problem at all, at least one that’s statewide in scope and in need of a statewide solution. They just don’t seem to care that Northern Virginia and Tidewater, the economic drivers of the rest of the state, are in states of emergency when it comes to transportation. It doesn’t seem to bother them one whit that the day is quickly coming when those two regions will simply exercise the political power they already possess and divert as much transportation money as they need to their regions, to the detriment of everyone else. Southwest, Southside and Central Virginia left out in the political desert? Who cares, certainly not folks like the majority leader and the speaker.

The response of many Republican legislators to the governor’s proposal is a terse “No.” Many don’t see, or are blind to, the statewide maintenance crisis that’s looming a few years out. Others, while grudgingly admitting there’s a “slight” problem, say the money could be found by “cutting fraud and wasteful spending.” Push them a little further, in an effort to get specifics from them, and you’ll hit a brick wall. They either don’t know (which is sad), or they know it would be their sacred political cows (even sadder).

Business groups from across the state recognize the scope of the problem, even if Richmond’s anti-taxers don’t. Chambers of commerce from Northern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley to the capital and Tidewater have urged the Assembly to work with the governor to craft a solution as quickly as possible. The state’s business leaders know that gridlock — politically in Richmond and literally on the state’s highways — serves no one.

Here’s what Clayton Roberts Jr., leader of the business-friendly Virginia Foundation for Research and Economic Education, told The Washington Post last week: “The business community is out of patience, and certainly there will be consequences (if nothing passes) … . We’ll fix it at the ballot box.”

It’s not a joke, Mr. Majority Leader. It’s not a threat, Mr. Speaker. It’s simply a fact that people who care about this commonwealth and its future are fed up with “leaders” whose vocabulary begins and ends with the word “No” and who refuse to lead.

Why the House Republicans aren’t listening to them — and in all likelihood won’t — is simply unfathomable.