The Washington Post has picked up on the trend that local governments in Virginia and Maryland are stepping in to pay for local roads that the states cannot afford to build. Localities, reports Eric Weiss, “are going into debt to embark on an unprecedented half-billion-dollar road-building boom to try to ease some of the area’s worst jams.”
The story is useful in that it illuminates the fact that the phenomenon is not limited to Virginia jurisdictions. (Let’s hope the WaPo editorial writers, who routinely castigate Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates for their resistance to raising taxes, notice that Maryland counties are experiencing similar problems.)
Weiss concludes that there are more tolls and bonds in the future, and he quotes Pierce Homer, Virginia’s Secretary of Transportation, as worrying that the local efforts are less likely to be coordinated than if the Virginia Department of Transportation has sufficient funds to undertake the projects itself — a legitimate concern. Road networks are regional in nature. Secondary roads are rightly the responsibility of local governments, but primaries and Interstates should be left to VDOT.
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