Articles

Buckle Your Seatbelts

It's going to be a wild ride. Governor-elect Tim Kaine will take transportation policy down a road Virginia has never been before. 

By Bob Burke

Give Democrat Tim Kaine credit for knowing his audience. His television ads last month, promising frustrated drivers in the exurbs of Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads that he would “give your community more power to stop out-of-control development” wooed enough of them from their GOP leanings to help him to a solid win over Republican Jerry Kilgore.

But now it’s time for a little reality TV. Kaine can’t keep that promise without some help from the Republican-led General Assembly, which hasn’t backed that kind of legislation even when it came from other Republicans. And, Kaine comes to office without having proposed any mechanism to raise the billions of dollars that many say Virginia needs to spend on transportation.

What’s more, a state Senate commission created by Republican Sen. John Chichester, R-Northumberland, is working on a package of legislation that is widely expected to include hiking transportation spending by billions of dollars. On the other side is the anti-tax House of Delegates, led by Speaker of the House William Howell, R-Stafford. Nobody knows how, or if, Kaine will try to navigate that divide.

Still, Kaine’s victory has sparked enthusiasm among proponents of changing the way Virginia handles growth. Kaine made linking land-use policy and transportation a cornerstone of his platform. “He is the first governor’s candidate in recent memory to not only run on the issue of better land management, but, we believe, to win on it,” says Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

So now what? Kaine’s first move after Tuesday’s election win was to announce a town meeting tour, starting next week in Manassas in Prince William County, to build support for dealing with what he called the state’s transportation “crisis.” That’s what he promised to do during the campaign, and skeptics out there plan to hold him to it. “What you have is a guy who has said that transportation is the number one problem in the state, and the next governor has to be the transportation governor, and we all heard him,” says Steve Haner of Virginians for Better Transportation.

Among Kaine’s transportation platform initiatives:

• Requiring traffic impact statements for new developments that require rezonings.

• Letting localities deny rezonings when roads aren’t able to handle the predicted traffic increase.

• Requiring the Virginia Department of Transportation to study traffic and land-use impacts of transportation projects. That means no more building bypass roads, for example, without thinking about the sprawling development they trigger.

• HOT lanes and public-private partnerships.

• Using budget surplus dollars for one-time transportation projects.

• Revamping the funding formula for transit to increase the amount of state financial support.

• Using tax breaks to spur renovations in inner suburbs and urban areas to encourage more people and businesses in areas where roads and transit are already in place, instead of building new roads in the outer suburbs.

Kaine’s lack of open support for raising taxes to pay for transportation projects – and his calls for better land management – leaves supporters of more funding searching for any hopeful signs. Jeff Southard, executive vice president of the Virginia Transportation Construction Alliance, noted that Kaine pledged during the campaign “to put all the issues on the table” in deciding what to do. That would include increasing the 17.5-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax, which hasn’t increased since 1986 and is lower than bordering states. Southard also thinks the gas tax should be indexed to adjust to rising construction costs.

But supporters of Kaine’s land-use approach are pushing different strategies. Schwartz says the coalition, besides backing Kaine on revamping land-use policies, is pushing for reducing demand on the existing road network, and getting regions in the state to develop a “more realistic project selection.” Some of the long-range transportation plans include highways that are so expensive they will never be built, he says. “Virginia has no choice from a fiscal perspective but to make a big part of [its] transportation reform agenda better land use practices that reduce the demand on the transportation system,” he says.

Schwartz predicts “a huge push-back from the development industry, not just on things like adequate public facilities, but on perhaps on the whole range of reforms. They were very unhappy with Kaine taking is growth-management position.”

After a campaign that saw developers cast as a factor in state’s transportation woes, Southard says Kaine will have to address the state’s role in the problem. “The people who build commercial office buildings and homes are not to blame” for congestion, he says. Localities give them permission to build, and the state hasn’t kept up with demand created by a growing economy. “That’s the nature of the crisis.”  

Bacon's Rebellion News Service

November 11, 2005