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Slow
Start for START
The
first meeting of a senate statewide task force was
long on PowerPoint presentations and short on
debate.
By
Bob Burke
RICHMOND--As a leader of a new task force
tackling the state’s transportation problems,
state Sen. Charles Hawkins, R-Pittsylvania, wasted no time in
setting the bar very high. At the first meeting of
the Statewide Transportation Analysis and
Recommendation Task Force, he boasted that
the group has the “background, intellect [and]
the understanding to come up with ideas that have
not been thought of before.”
Maybe the task
force, which goes by the optimistic acronym
START, really is that smart, but it was hard to
tell during Tuesday’s opening session, held at
Virginia Commonwealth University. For the most
part the two dozen or so START members didn’t
say much. Instead, they sat for about two and a
half hours listening to presentations
that described the dismal state of Virginia’s
transportation network, and the wide gap between what
many believe the state needs to spend and what it
has to spend.
There’s a lot of interest in
START’s work because it’s expected to produce
the Senate’s version of a transportation funding
bill in the coming General Assembly session, which
is widely expected to include a tax increase.
START was launched earlier this year by state Sen.
John Chichester, R-Northumberland, who is chairman of the Senate Finance
Committee and a key architect of last year’s
General Assembly tax hike. “We’ve got to
invest now, because we’re late,” Chichester
told task force members.
Hawkins urged the group
not to count on a continuing supply of cheap
gasoline and called for “innovative thinking.”
That thinking, though, will have to come from a
relatively limited spectrum: The task force has 10
state senators and 15 others, mostly from the
business community.
A
main theme of the meeting was
the state’s funding shortfall for
transportation. The state’s 17.5-cents-
per-gallon
gasoline tax hasn’t gone up since 1986, and the
recent VTrans 2025 study estimated the state’s
transportation needs over the next 20 years at
$203 billion, way above the expected $95 billion
in revenues.
The lead-off speaker was Ray Pethtel,
a former interim commissioner of the Virginia
Department of Transportation and a university
transportation fellow at Virginia Tech. In a broad
overview, he covered topics from safety to the
cost of congestion to tax strategies. Former VDOT
commissioner Philip Shucet gave an impassioned
speech lamenting the condition of the
transportation network in Hampton Roads and around
the state. Calling for political leadership, he
said, “If we are to do anything about the terrible
situation we face, we have to have money. We have
to act. Otherwise, all the
transportation-related discussions about land-use
planning, environmental protection, enhanced
safety, improved operations and the like are of
diminished value.”
Shucet’s pointed comments
stood in contrast to some other less-successful
efforts to throw light on the issue. Hal Greer,
division chief at the Joint Legislative Audit and
Review Commission, known as JLARC, gave a
presentation that explored how the VTrans 2025
committee came up with the $203 billion figure. He
talked about methodologies and assumptions and
variables, and at the end of his talk, Sen. Edd
Houck asked him point blank: So is the $203
billion figure too high or too low?
Greer waffled. There are some things that would
make it seem a bit high, he said, and some things
that would make it a bit low. “I can’t say
whether it’s high or low,” he said.
Hawkins, though, never lost his enthusiasm. “I
honestly believe this may be the best opportunity
for an open debate… that we may have,” he said
near the end of the meeting.
But the
START group’s start seemed heavy on PowerPoint
presentations and light on actual debate. In fact,
several presenters distributed copies of their
presentations at the same time they were giving
them, suggesting that they could have mailed them
out last week and let START members talk about
them on Tuesday.
The group has three more meetings planned this
year – the next will be Oct. 20, also at VCU.
Bacon's
Rebellion News Service
September
22, 2005
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