Scrambling Apart
It's time to make a deal on transportation in Virginia.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

HAVING SEEN Virginia's first spending plan for transportation since 1986 eviscerated before their eyes, courtesy of a state Supreme Court decision, lawmakers in Richmond are scrambling to develop a substitute. Unfortunately, they are scrambling in opposite directions. Unless the two parties commit themselves to genuine give-and-take, there is a real risk that the state's sclerotic network of roads, rails and bridges will continue to go untended.

Democrats who control the state Senate are proposing a fix that would restore the $400 million in annual transportation funding for Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads that was stripped by the court. It would also replenish the vanishing pool of statewide funding for road construction. Republicans in the House would rather outsource the regional problem to individual localities by letting them impose their own taxes, while turning a blind eye to the statewide problem.

The Senate plan is responsible and forward-looking. It would furnish the state with adequate funding for road construction; the current budget is being sponged up by burgeoning maintenance costs. But the Senate plan is also costly, with an annual price tag in taxes and fees approaching $1 billion. For better or for worse -- we think for worse -- it is unlikely to make headway in a GOP-controlled House that has made clear that it would rather sacrifice its shrinking majority than address the state's deteriorating infrastructure.

The House's own plan -- punting the question of new taxes and fees to individual localities -- is a ludicrous recipe for inaction. In Northern Virginia alone, there are nine jurisdictions, each of which could, and would, choose to impose different taxes and fees in differing amounts. The result would be a patchwork of incoherent and competing plans. What good would a road-widening in Fairfax County be if it ended at the Prince William County line?

What the two plans have in common is that neither is politically achievable. A compromise could take many forms, but the most obvious would also be the simplest. The court said that the General Assembly could not shift its taxing authority to a non-elected regional authority. But the legislature is free to levy the very same menu of seven taxes and fees that it had empowered the regional authority to impose. Both sides would regard that outcome as half a loaf, and the Democrats are right that it would leave statewide construction funding imperiled by soaring maintenance costs. But to do nothing at this point would be the worst option. That's been the practice since 1986, and the results have been traffic tie-ups and deteriorating infrastructure that are testing the patience and undercutting the economy of the state's most dynamic regions.