House GOP to Blame for Failure of Special Session

The General Assembly’s special session, called by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to take up various proposals to deal with the state’s looming transportation crisis, ended in utter failure.

But those with egg on their faces are neither the governor nor the Democrats who control the State Senate. It’s the anti-tax, heads-in-the-sand wing of the Republican Party that calls the shots in the House of Delegates.

Gov. Kaine, to his credit, put forward a credible plan to provide approximately $1.1 billion a year to pay for various transportation initiatives ranging from routine maintenance across the state to new construction projects in Northern Virginia and Tidewater, as well as mass transit and rail projects. His main funding sources were statewide versions of taxes and fees that Republicans in the House had themselves voted to increase, albeit indirectly, in 2007 when they created two regional transportation authorities for the expressed purpose of levying taxes and fees to pay for construction projects. (The state Supreme Court declared those bodies unconstitutional because they were unelected.)

As we’ve said in the past, a straightforward increase in the gas tax — the tax established to pay for transportation in Virginia and unchanged since 1986 — is the most logical and philosophically honest way to pay for the state’s needs. Still, we understand the political reasons the governor chose his particular approach.

The Senate, led by Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, substituted a 6-penny increase in the gas tax spread over six years as its way to pay for the majority of transportation needs. That plan, unfortunately, was dead before it even arrived in the House where even some Democrats were uncomfortable with raising the gas tax.

But at least Democrats in the Assembly recognize the seriousness of the problem the commonwealth faces in the coming years. The House Republicans and their allies treated the entire special session as a game of political brinksmanship to be played with the governor and the Democrats in advance of the 2009 state elections.

Just consider these three sordid tales of politics from the session.

First, Attorney General Bob McDonnell, the GOP’s likely nominee for governor in 2009, proposed that nothing be done until a full-fledged, independent audit of the transportation department could be undertaken and completed.

What that clever little ruse masked over was the fact that, since 2001, VDOT has undergone eight such audits, which tallied and corrected the mismanagement of the department that occurred under the administration of Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore.

Not to be outdone, Del. Phillip Hamilton, R-Newport News, put forth his funding proposal: 30 percent of money from future increases in business at the state’s seaports and Dulles and Reagan National airports in Northern Virginia. How much money would that mean for construction and maintenance, asked Minority Leader Ward Armstrong of Henry County. Neither Hamilton nor any other House Republican knew.

The capper was a proposal by Del. Christopher Saxman, R-Staunton, whose proposal to pay for transportation was — now get this — to direct all revenues from offshore oil drilling to VDOT. In true House fashion of passing the real work off on somebody else, the measure was dependent on the Democratic Congress lifting the national drilling moratorium. (And we all know that a snowball has a better chance of survival in you-know-where than that happening anytime soon.)

More than 40 years ago, when “tax” was as dirty a word as it is today, then-Gov. Mills E. Godwin came into office with a grand plan to bring the commonwealth’s higher-education system into the modern age with the creation of the Virginia Community College System.

Godwin, an arch-conservative who later won the governor’s office as a Republican, proposed the state sales tax to pay for his initiative. There was howling and screaming from one end of the state to the other from the usual suspects, but Godwin pushed and cajoled until the Assembly approved the plan.

In the years since, who can possibly deny the success of the state’s community colleges? And it all came about because Godwin was a true leader, statesman and political visionary.

The so-called leaders of the Republican majority in the House of Delegates refuse to acknowledge the existence of a statewide transportation need; they only grudgingly admit there’s a transportation problem in Northern Virginia and Tidewater. The “solutions” the propose for those areas aren’t really solutions at all and, in typical Richmond fashion, simply pass the buck and responsibility for action down to already strapped local governments.

Their refusal to admit the existence of a looming statewide maintenance crisis threatens the economic health of huge geographic areas of the commonwealth and of hundreds of thousands of their fellow Virginians.

Their lack of political courage and plain common sense is just appalling. And the Old Dominion is going to pay a high price for it.