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Legislators throw down road blocks in transportation session
Legislators are moving at the speed of Northern Virginia traffic this week as the General Assembly slogs through a special session on transportation.
The session that began on Monday morning was completely mired down by Tuesday. Gov. Tim Kaine (D) has introduced a plan for funding transportation but he has no sponsors in the Senate and the House of Delegates is refusing to even consider the proposal unless the Senate acts first.
In the meantime, Senate Democrats, led by Fairfax Sen. Dick Saslaw (D-35th) and Prince William Sen. Chuck Colgan (D-29th), may have enough votes to get a gas tax increase through the Senate but it is almost certainly dead on arrival in the House.
The entire situation is fraught with politics and intentional road blocks.
The governor cannot introduce a bill himself; he must convince a legislator in the House or Senate – or preferably both – to introduce it for him. Martinsville Delegate Ward Armstrong (D-10th) has introduced Kaine’s bill in the House but Speaker William Howell (R-28th), an opponent of the Kaine plan, referred the bill to his own Rules Committee and has refused to call a committee meeting to discuss it. That essentially holds Kaine’s plan in limbo; without a committee meeting, the bill cannot be voted on or discussed.
In the Democratically-controlled Senate, Kaine couldn’t even find a sponsor for the bill.
“The structure of the governor’s bill is what a lot of us have trouble with,” Saslaw said on Tuesday. “That’s a huge problem.”
Kaine’s plan is a three-pronged approach based on safety improvements, regional fixes and alternatives to roads. Each piece of the transportation puzzle is accompanied by a tax increase to fund it.
The first part of Kaine’s proposal is a stable maintenance fund to keep bridges and roads in good repair and to free up existing funds for new projects. To pay for the maintenance fund, Kaine would increase the annual vehicle registration fee by $10. He’d also up the statewide automobile sales tax from 3 to 4 percent.
The second piece of the Kaine plan is a targeted approach for Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.
The governor’s plan would increase the sales tax by 1 percent in both regions on everything except food and medicine. The funds would be used only for regional projects.
The final part of the transportation puzzle is Kaine’s “transportation change fund.” The governor has called for the creation of a special fund to pay for alternative solutions, such as transit, rail, telework and ridesharing.
Under his plan, 75 percent of the fund would be used for transit and rail projects while the rest could be used for new solutions to gridlock, as well as for airports and harbor projects that support economic development.
To fund the transportation change fund, Kaine has proposed increasing the grantor’s tax by 25 cents statewide. That’s less than the 40-cent tax hike that was approved only for Northern Virginia last year before being struck down by the Virginia Supreme Court.
The problem is, Northern Virginia generates more of the grantor’s tax than any other region in the state, Saslaw explained. While Northern Virginia legislators were willing to raise the grantor’s tax to fund Northern Virginia projects last year, they’re not willing to raise a tax that will hit the region disproportionately and then share it with the rest of the state.
Additionally, he said, many Northern Virginia legislators also oppose the 1 percent regional sales tax increase because voters turned down a ½-cent increase in the transportation referendum several years ago.
Saslaw has introduced his own funding plan that includes a 1-cent increase in the gas tax. That gas tax increase means the average driver would pay an extra $7.50 each year to fuel up.
“For that price he has to give up one-and-a-half Big Mac meals per year,” Saslaw said. “That ain’t a lot.”
Saslaw’s subcommittee made short work of an alternative proposal Tuesday afternoon, voting to recommend that Fairfax Sen. Ken Cuccinelli’s (R-37th) bill be killed. Cuccinelli’s plan called for 1 percent from the state sales tax be dedicated to transportation. Currently, only a half-percent goes to transportation. The bill would not raise taxes, only reallocate them from the General Fund to the Transportation Trust Fund.
“The one part of that budget that has been underfunded, and maybe the only part, is transportation,” he said Monday.
But the subcommittee disagreed.
“We don’t need to make the General Fund problem we have even more significant,” said
Spotsylvania Sen. Ed Houck (D-17th).
The Senate Finance Committee is likely to stick with the subcommittee recommendation to kill Cuccinelli’s proposal.
On the House side, Kaine’s bill isn’t the only one that has been sent into limbo. A compromise plan by Springfield Del. Dave Albo (R-42nd) and Herndon Del. Tom Rust (R-86th) is sitting in that same committee with no hearing scheduled.
Albo says his proposal is a compromise between the various “massive tax increase” plans supported by Kaine and Saslaw and the “do-nothing crowd,” made up mostly of House Republicans, who want only to audit VDOT to find cost savings.
Loudoun Delegate Bob Marshall (R-13th) is one supporter of the audit plans. Marshall said on Monday that he believes concerted legislative oversight of all state agencies could save the state $1.1 billion – the same amount missing from the transportation budget.
“Why would you do new taxes when you could do the same with some sweat equity on our part?” he asked.
But according to Albo, even if VDOT’s expenses were cut in half, there still wouldn’t be enough money to fund the state’s transportation needs.
The Albo-Rust plan is to reform VDOT for cost-savings but also to institute the regional tax increases approved last year by the General Assembly. Last year’s plan was ruled unconstitutional by the Virginia Supreme Court because it gave taxing authority to the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, an unelected body.
The bill also funds statewide maintenance with a 2-percent increase in the hotel tax, a $20 increase on traffic court costs, a truck surtax and a $150 one-time driver’s license fee that would not apply to 16- and 17-year-olds.
Not that it matters. Albo’s bill isn’t going anywhere any time soon either.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the Senate had plans to discuss its own proposals in various committee meetings later in the day. The House of Delegates was expected to discuss bills dealing with the VDOT audits but had no plans to take up any of the controversial House bills regarding new taxes or funds. House leaders have said they will not discuss any revenue bills until the Senate has approved its own proposals.
With many Democrats unwilling to consider plans that don’t include new revenue and many Republicans unwilling to consider new revenue, a week of inaction seems likely. “There’s going to be just enough backbone in Richmond here this week to stop taxes,” Cuccinelli said.
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