The special General Assembly session on transportation collapsed in a heap yesterday, with no one agreeing on much of anything. None of the three major proposals for raising revenue to fund transportation improvements managed to get any traction.
There were three major proposals on the table, one submitted by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, one by the Democratic-controlled state Senate and one by the Republican-controlled House of Delegates. (Actually, according to press reports, the House trotted out a couple of different ideas.) All died. Predictably, Democrats blamed Republicans, Republicans blamed Democrats and editorial writers wrung their hands at the inability to achieve a consensus.
Here’s the reason that consensus is so difficult to achieve: When the debate is about raising taxes, the issue quickly focuses on who pays. While most of the constituencies involved want more money to spend, they all want someone else to pay. The real estate industry opposes grantor’s taxes. The auto dealer’s lobby oppose car titling taxes. Defenders of the poor oppose the gasoline tax. Richmonders don’t want to pay for roads in Northern Virginia.
As I’ve noted before, politics is all about getting someone else to pay for what you want. With the terms of debate framed the way they are, a consensus is unachievable. The tax hikes are a zero sum game. If someone comes out ahead, someone else loses. When there is no electoral groundswell for higher taxes and the agitation comes overwhelmingly from business interests , the debate inevitably pits one set of business constituencies and regional interests against another — a recipe for gridlock.
The only way to create a political solution is to craft legislation based on user pays principles: If you pay higher taxes or tolls, in return you get improvements to infrastructure that you use. Voters aren’t willing to raise a bunch of money and hand it over to the government — either at the state level or the regional level — where it disappears into a black box where only the special interests can influence how it is spent. Citizens want ironclad guarantees that they get something in return for their money.
As I’ve preached over and over, the first place to start is with the gas tax. The problem with the Saslaw bill is that it would raise a whole lot of money and distribute it via the same arcane and opaque funding formulas and project-selection processes, subject to manipulation by the special interests, that exist today. To win voter trust, we need to set the gas tax not at some arbitrary level but at whatever level it takes to do two things: (a) maintain state roads and bridges, and (b) provide state matching moneys for federally funded projects. And nothing else.
In the short run, such a measure would actually provide citizens a tax cut. That would make it easier to sell politically. Over the longer haul, as maintenance costs escalate, the gas tax eventually would float higher than the 17.5 cents per gallon charged today, bringing more money into the system than we have now. But citizens would be willing to accept those increases because they know that their tax money was paying for their share of road maintenance, not funding boondoggles.
How, then, do we pay for new roads? I’ve explained it all before. Toll roads, whether operated by the state or by public-private partnerships. Congestion pricing corridors. Impact fees. Community Development Authorities. If road projects can’t support themselves in the open marketplace, there is no economic justification for them and they shouldn’t be built. Virginians would soon learn that the transportation “crisis” isn’t a crisis for anyone but the rent seekers who feed at the government trough.