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Transportation talk revs up in Richmond
The official battle over transportation has begun.
On Monday afternoon, Gov. Tim Kaine (D) addressed the General Assembly, working to convince legislators to adopt his transportation funding plan – or any transportation funding plan.
But it’s a hard sell, and it seems unlikely that anything significant will come from this week’s special session.
Kaine’s plan is a three-pronged approach based on safety improvements, regional fixes and alternatives to roads. Each piece of the transportation puzzle is accompanied by a tax increase to fund it.
Kaine calls the first part of his proposal the “safety first” program. If approved, it would create a stable maintenance fund to repair or replace aging bridges and roads and also would free up existing funds for new roads and transit projects.
To pay for the maintenance fund, Kaine would increase the annual vehicle registration fee by $10 and would raise the statewide automobile sales tax from 3 percent to 4 percent. Those two tax hikes would raise $400 million in the first year, and all of that would be dedicated to the maintenance fund, according to Kaine.
The second piece of the Kaine plan is called “regional relief.” It is a targeted approach for Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. The governor’s plan would increase the sales tax by 1 percent in both regions on everything except food and medicine. The funds would be used only for regional projects.
The final part of the transportation puzzle is Kaine’s “transportation change fund.” The governor has called for the creation of a special fund to pay for alternative solutions, such as transit, rail, telework and ride sharing.
Under his plan, 75 percent of the fund would be used for transit and rail projects while the rest could be used for new solutions to gridlock, as well as for airports and harbor projects that support economic development.
To fund the transportation change fund, Kaine has proposed increasing the grantor’s tax by 25 cents statewide. That’s less than the 40-cent tax hike that was approved only for Northern Virginia last year before being struck down by the Virginia Supreme Court.
Kaine said he believes his plan is not perfect but is “a solid plan that gets the job done.”
However, he said that if legislators have alternative proposals, he will work with them to find a compromise.
“Any who advance a legitimate proposal will find a friend in me, willing to join in a solution to our needs,” he said. “But none of us should tolerate inaction. Evasion of responsibility should not be a character trait of this body.”
Kaine’s plea didn’t go down particularly well.
In a taped response, Western Loudoun Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel (R-27th) pointed out that Kaine has failed to pick up even a strong Democratic support for his proposal.
“Governor Kaine has failed to build consensus or support for his plan before calling legislators back to Richmond,” she said, adding that “there is no indication that the people of Virginia support his proposal.”
For the most part, the senators adjourned without comment on the governor’s plan. Delegates, on the other hand, were vociferous in their objections.
Other solutions
“A statewide tax is a recipe for disaster,” said Centreville Del. Tim Hugo (R-40th). “A statewide tax will bring down the bill.”
Hugo said he spent the weekend talking to constituents and concluded that three-quarters would be willing to grudgingly accept tax increases if and only if the money stays in Northern Virginia.
But they said “'absolutely no’ to a statewide tax where the money doesn’t come back to Northern Virginia,” he added, stressing that the legislators should just fix the transportation bill that was approved last year before being struck down by the Virginia Supreme Court.
That bill provided funding to Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads based on taxes raised only in those regions.
But Blacksburg Del. James Shuler (D-12th) said the rest of the state won’t go along with that now.
“We in rural Virginia do not want to be left out,” he said. “We would like to vote for a statewide plan, but if there is not a statewide plan, we have problems with that.”
A number of alternative plans already have been introduced, primarily on the House side. Most of the bills, introduced by Republicans, change funding formulas without increasing taxes.
Springfield Del. Dave Albo (R-42nd) has suggested a plan that would allocate transportation money based on population among the state’s nine transportation districts. Several other bills also reallocate money based on population or the number of vehicles registered in a particular region.
Prince William Del. Scott Lingamfelter (R-31st) would eliminate the state’s current 17.5-cents-per-gallon gas tax and would replace it with a standard 5 percent sales tax.
Lingamfelter said the reason is that as cars become more fuel-efficient, gas sales decline, meaning less revenue for the state. A 5 percent sales tax would better keep pace with fuel efficiency, and at the current price of gas, would mean taxes would stay about the same.
South-central Loudoun Del. Bob Marshall (R-13th) disagreed.
“That actually makes the tax higher right now,” Marshall said, adding that on the flip side, if the price of gas drops significantly, revenue will too. “I don’t think it works,” he said.
Marshall is instead floating his own plans, which he says will find more money without raising taxes. One of Marshall’s key goals is to increase government efficiency. His plan is to put every member of the General Assembly on commissions to look at agency spending. He estimates that $1.1 billion could be saved through better government, and all of that money could be dedicated to transportation.
“We should not work in a way that a family wouldn’t act, and a family wouldn’t spend more money in the absence of trying to save,” he said.
The money-saving audit is a popular idea on the Republican side of the aisle. Lingamfelter has introduced a bill calling for an external audit of VDOT, an idea which Kaine has derided, maintaining that it’s been done numerous times before.
Lingamfelter countered that past audits have been primarily internal and that “there’s no such thing as a self-butchering hog.”
On the Senate side, it appears likely that a gas tax increase will be the dominant plan, although as of Monday afternoon, no tax increase bills had been introduced.
However Fairfax Sen. Ken Cuccinelli (R-37th) has submitted a plan to put more money into transportation without increasing revenue.
Cuccinelli said Virginia families have been forced to alter their budgets in the last year to allocate more money for transportation and the state government should do the same.
“The one part of that budget that has been underfunded, and maybe the only part, is transportation,” he said.
Other proposals have been introduced and the bills are still pouring in. At this point, however, there is no consensus on any of them. The Senate Finance Committee will start discussing plans at 9 a.m. June 24, though they currently have only three bills to consider.
The House of Delegates, which already has dozens of bills, has no immediate plans to act on any of them. Speaker William Howell (R-28th) has not scheduled any committee meetings to consider bills. He did order the delegates to return to session Tuesday at 11 a.m., essentially, he said, so that they could make more speeches.
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