The General Assembly is reconvening today to consider a number of issues, most prominently budgetary ones. There are two pieces of the situation that I understand with some clarity. First, the commonwealth is facing a revenue shortfall of some $1.55 billion in the current biennium. Second, Congress failed to pass an Internet tax that the masterminds of McDonnell-era transportation tax “reform” were counting on to fund Virginia’s roads, highways and rail to the tune of $1 billion over five years. The rest of it is an indecipherable mess that will leave voters utterly confused about what is going on, with no idea of whom to hold accountable or why.
Michael Martz, the Times-Dispatch’s go-to guy for explaining topics of mind-numbing complexity, gave it his honest try in the newspaper today, but the result is an incoherent mess. I don’t blame Martz for the incoherence — I blame the legislature and its Rube Goldberg approach to budgeting. Adding to the sense of urgency, a failure to act could threaten $100 million in bonds to be issued by the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority.
This is what you get when you try to “fix” transportation funding by abandoning all logic and principle — such as the old “user pays” system in which pay to build and maintain roads in proportion to which you use them — and substituting a system of subsidies and cross subsidies so that no one is really sure who’s paying for what. This is the environment in which politicians thrive because it allows them to engage in horse trading, deal making and the collection of chits. But the invariable result is episodic chaos — not to mention the overuse of roads that comes from severing the connection between using and paying for them.
— JAB