Putney Was Failed by His Colleagues

It was a week ago today, we commended Del. Lacey Putney, of Bedford, for having the courage, the backbone and the strength of character for uttering the unutterable truth in Richmond: that taxes in the Commonwealth of Virginia must rise.

Putney, the longest serving member of the House of Delegates in the commonwealth’s history and chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, filed a bill to increase Virginia’s sales tax from 5 percent to 6 percent beginning Jan. 1, 2013, subject to voter referendum. The estimated $1.1 billion it would have raised would have gone to fund core state services, such as transportation, public safety and education.

On Wednesday, a subcommittee of the House Finance Committee, tabled the legislation, the polite way legislators kill bills that deal with issues they don’t want to confront.

And making the motion to kill Putney’s legislation was another Central Virginia legislator, Del. Kathy Byron, a Republican from Campbell County. “I just want to thank him for his service and hope he understands our decision,” Del. Byron said. And “with the utmost respect,” she and her subcommittee members dispensed with the bill.

We certainly understand the rationale behind decision of Byron and her fellow panel members to kill the legislation. And, had it miraculously made it out of committee to the floor of the House or even to Senate for consideration, we fully understand that rationale, too.

It was a decision based on nothing more than a lack of courage on the part of politicians who are more interested in the next election and preserving the Republican Party’s brand as the Party of No New Taxes.

Lacey Putney is no wild-eyed, tax-and-spend liberal; he’s as fiscally conservative as they come. But he’s a Virginia statesman who knows the commonwealth is facing a crisis of monumental proportions. From transportation to public safety, from public education to basic services, Virginia is simply running out of money.

The gasoline tax, which is the primary means of paying for transportation needs in Virginia, hasn’t been raised since 1986. In the intervening quarter of a century, the purchasing power of those dollars has been cut in half. In the same emergency session of the General Assembly in which legislators raised the gas tax, they also raised the sales to cover highway costs. Since then? Nothing.

Republican legislators who mindlessly chant the mantra of “No New Taxes” and refuse to heed the warnings of such statesmen as Lacey Putney, sooner or later, will reap the whirlwind. They’ll have to confront a crisis the likes of which they haven’t seen in their careers, and they won’t know what to do.

Except mouth “No ... New ... Taxes.”