Showdown and Shutdown
Virginia's GOP legislators play a risky game with the budget.

Friday, June 9, 2006

THE REPUBLICAN leadership in Virginia's General Assembly is so badly divided over taxes and transportation funding that it is driving the state toward a shutdown in government services when the new fiscal year begins July 1. That's not what one expects from a state that touts itself as the nation's best-managed, and it's not what media reports suggested was on the horizon two weeks ago. At the time, the GOP leadership in the Virginia Senate dropped its demand for new taxes to fix the state's nasty transportation mess. That prompted expectations of a break in the months-long budget impasse between the Senate and the House of Delegates.

In fact, the Senate's retreat -- or rather, non-retreat -- was tactical. Rather than back down, senators have stuck to their principled position that only new, reliable and long-term funding sources can help Virginia's obsolete road and rail networks. In keeping with that stance, they are rejecting the gimmickry and Band-Aid approaches embraced by the anti-tax advocates in the House, who would rather finesse the transportation mess than fix it. The result: no new budget as the clock winds down on the fiscal year.

Facing a multi-decade problem that will take tens of billions of dollars to address, House delegates are using sleight of hand to make it appear that they are serious about a solution. They have proposed $800 million for transportation, which sounds substantial until you look at the details. In fact, much of that money was already set aside for transportation; some of it comes from unknown sources (education? public safety?); and little of it deals with the problem beyond 2008. It ignores the fact that swelling demands for road maintenance will sponge up every available transportation dollar in just a few years, leaving nothing for new construction. The House plan is smoke and mirrors masquerading as asphalt and cement.

The anti-tax fundamentalists in the House say they are loath to raise taxes when the state is flush. They ignore the reality that surpluses never last and that stopgap funding will not resolve a generational problem such as transportation. What's needed is long-term thinking and a recognition that when times get tougher, it will be harder, not easier, to muster the political will to invest in transportation. But while senators are focusing on the state's most-pressing long-term challenge, House members are interested mainly in dodging a political bullet. They won't succeed.