Sunday, October 29, 2006

Each day development squeezes more vehicles onto Northern Virginia's outdated, overcrowded roads. People can't get to work on time, children can't get to school on time and we're squandering hours on the highways when we should be home with our families. The other day, it took me 40 minutes to go five miles -- just from eastern Loudoun County to western Fairfax.

But the most frustrating aspect of Northern Virginia's traffic problem is our elected officials' recurring inability to solve it.

The Northern Virginia economy is booming. Loudoun has the nation's highest median income, with Fairfax County not far behind. Yet the traffic produced by our prosperity threatens to strangle that prosperity like a vehicular boa constrictor. And we can't seem to save ourselves.

This is not an economic crisis -- it's a crisis of leadership on the part of our elected representatives. Their latest failure was the General Assembly's abortive special session on transportation last month.

Northern Virginia's infrastructure lags progressively farther behind development, and the only way it can catch up is through increased funding.

Yes, restricting future development is vital to avoid making a bad problem worse. But let's also fix the problem we have.

Developers fund infrastructure only in connection with new projects.

Issuing bonds simply postpones the funding decision. Unfortunately, new taxes or user fees will be needed.

As a homeowner with a family, I don't like taxes or fees. But transportation, like education and law enforcement, is an essential government service. Skimping on essential services creates big problems (gridlock, substandard schools and crime) that none of us wants.

Yet the "anti-tax" members of the General Assembly have blocked a solution to our transportation crisis. Make no mistake: These supposed conservatives are taxing our precious time by causing us to waste it in traffic and shamelessly running up a huge infrastructure deficit.

Next time you're stuck in a backup that stretches to the horizon, ask yourself: When did I authorize my elected representatives to confiscate these hours of my life -- hours that I should be spending with family, hours that I will never get back? When did I allow them to seize part of the value of my home, which is worth less thanks to the endless commute that now comes with it?

And Virginia legislators who have signed a "no-tax pledge" have abdicated their responsibility to govern. We elect them to weigh difficult trade-offs and make the best (or least-bad) choice -- not to substitute dogma for deliberation and common sense.

Let's call this anti-tax demagoguery what it is for Northern Virginia: pro-gridlock, anti-family and anti-growth.

Here in Loudoun, zoning allows development that far outstrips the meager funding available for infrastructure, so we're digging ourselves deeper into an infrastructure hole. In desperation, many have embraced a developer plan to pay for about $300 million in infrastructure -- and to build 27,000 more houses in the eastern part of the county.

According to this plan, the way to climb out of our infrastructure hole is to dig a lot deeper. We can have desperately needed relief -- at the price of further development that will compound our traffic misery and needlessly increase taxes. It's time we in Loudoun and Northern Virginia break our addiction to irresponsible development.

We need reliable funding to deal with our traffic crisis. And we should be free to address the crisis without being prey to the Faustian bargains peddled by developers.

-- Charles Chappell

South Riding