Virginia's Man in a Hurry

Like dozens of governors around the country, Virginia's brand-new chief executive, Tim Kaine, is sitting atop a big budget surplus -- about $1 billion and counting. But with blessings like that, who needs problems?

Tough-minded, brisk and self-assured, Kaine, who was sworn in Saturday, is serious about dealing with the state's No. 1 problem: its sclerotic road system. He is also realist enough to know that the obstacles he faces are at least equal to those his predecessor, Mark R. Warner, overcame two years ago when he pushed a $1.5 billion tax increase through the state's Republican-dominated legislature.

That triumph, after months of bitter wrangling, yielded new money for Virginia's ailing public schools, preserved the state's gold-plated bond rating and launched Warner's putative presidential candidacy. It also contributed to the state's current budget surplus.

The surplus, plus a residue of partisan acrimony from Warner's 2004 triumph, is among Kaine's challenges as he crafts a rescue package for the state's jampacked roads. To make any meaningful dent in the problem -- that is, to improve the state's road system, not just maintain it -- he needs to find at least $1 billion a year, a second gusher of new revenue on top of the one Warner unleashed two years ago. But how to convince Republicans who see the surplus as evidence that Warner snookered them into an unneeded tax increase, and are determined not to be fooled again?

Warner's tax increase attracted broad public backing; of the Republican lawmakers who broke with their leadership to support it, nearly all retained their seats despite dark threats of revenge from tax-haters such as Grover Norquist.

Yet Warner enjoyed a number of advantages that Kaine lacks. He proposed his tax package only after two years of slash-and-burn budget cuts established his bona fides as a fiscal moderate. He argued, with reason, that Virginia's cherished AAA bond rating was at risk unless the state found big new bucks. And in selling his tax package as a bailout for public schools, he was able to invoke an almost universally popular cause.

Kaine, by contrast, is a man in a hurry. Retirements and elections for the state Senate next year could produce an even less tax-friendly legislature down the road. Given the surplus, Virginia's bond rating is ensured. And the transportation crisis, which cuts deeply in Northern Virginia, Richmond and Tidewater, is a tougher sell in the state's rural areas.

The last governor to take on the job of improving Virginia's transportation network was Gerald L. Baliles, 20 years ago. Since then, population, jobs and traffic have boomed while the slice of state spending for transportation has shriveled. About a quarter of the state's major roads and bridges need fixes. Unless new money is found, the state estimates that every nickel of its transportation budget will be spent on maintenance by 2018, leaving nothing for new or wider roads, let alone pricey rail projects. In Northern Virginia, the cost of improvements is expected to exceed available funds by $15 billion over the next 25 years.

Kaine managed to devise an electoral formula -- winning huge in the suburbs -- that departed from Warner's rural strategy. Now he needs a new template to push through money for transportation. He may start out with a different mix of funding sources than Warner proposed -- more from borrowing, tolls and user fees, less sales and cigarette taxes. But what he may really need is a new coalition of Republican backers in the House of Delegates -- and a strategy to hook them. Call it the Albo strategy.

Del. David B. Albo, a veteran Fairfax Republican from Springfield, opposed Warner's tax increase; he was reelected in November, but barely. Kaine may lose some of the rural Republicans who, for the sake of school spending, broke party ranks to support Warner. But maybe he can replace them with suburban Republicans such as Albo, who could be hard-pressed to vote against new roads and rail spending -- especially if it is linked to Kaine's populist proposal to limit the approval of new developments that would overwhelm local roads.

Virginia's Republican leaders are still grinding their teeth over Warner's tax package, and over the GOP defectors in 2004 who they think made a one-term Democratic governor into a presidential contender. They may be wary of helping to lionize a second consecutive Democratic governor. But their anxiety is misplaced. What should really worry them is standing against the first governor in a generation who is trying to do something about traffic.

The writer is a member of the editorial page staff. His e-mail address ishockstaderl@washpost.com.