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Gridlock
The gridlock continued Wednesday as the General Assembly entered day three of its special session to resolve the state’s transportation issues. A handful of competing plans are working their way through the legislature but it seems unlikely that any will be enacted.Gov. Tim Kaine (D) has proposed a series of tax increases aimed at funding transportation but his plan has been met with overwhelming hostility in both houses. The funding package has been held in limbo since Monday by the House and Kaine does not have a sponsor in the Senate.
Senate Democrats, led by Springfield Sen. Dick Saslaw (D-35th), appear poised to approve a competing series of tax hikes that may be acceptable to Kaine, but the House of Delegates has vowed to kill any tax increases.
In the meantime, House leaders are working to position the senators as the ones causing the roadblock. Speaker William Howell (R-28th) has been refusing to allow any revenue bills to be heard in the House until the Senate adopts a plan of its own. On Wednesday, as the Senate was poised to adopt Saslaw’s tax plan, Howell convened a House Rules Committee meeting to hear Kaine’s proposal, though he said the committee would not vote until after the Senate has acted on its own bills.
To pay for road maintenance and alternative transportation, Kaine’s plan would raise the annual vehicle registration fee and the statewide automobile sales tax, along with the grantor’s tax. The plan also includes 1-percent sales tax increases in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to pay for regional projects.
But the Republican-dominated committee members insisted that given the downturn in the economy, the time isn’t right to raise taxes.
“We keep taking more and more of their money and wasting more and more,” said Glen Allen Delegate Frank Hargrove (R-55th).
Martinsville Delegate Ward Armstrong (D-10th), the bill’s sponsor in the House, responded that “There’s never, I suppose, a good time to raise taxes,” but he argued that the transportation situation is an emergency. A good analogy would be to ask someone if they want surgery, he said.
“What if I had told you that your appendix had just ruptured?” he continued. “Do you want surgery?”
But the committee members were unmoved and the only question was how long it would take delegates to kill the measure.
In the meantime, the Senate was expected to wrap up its own business by the end of the day on Wednesday. The primary plan being considered is Saslaw’s tax increase package. The bill included a 1-cent-per-gallon gas tax increase each year for the next six years and a ½-percent titling tax on car sales.
Saslaw estimated that the gas tax hike would mean the average driver pays 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.”
To offset the extra pain at the pump, Saslaw’s plan would remove a ½-percent sales tax on food.
“That would save that family and every family of four an average of $50 a year,” he said, pointing out that the food tax savings for a family is more than the one-car gas tax cost, even when fully-phased in at 6 cents per gallon.
The Saslaw plan also includes regional packages for Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. Northern Virginia residents would pay an extra ½-percent sales tax, a 40-cent increase in the grantor’s tax and an additional $5 per night on hotel rooms. That package would raise $340 million per year for Northern Virginia projects, Saslaw said.
Hampton Roads residents would pay similar tax increases for $221 million per year in road improvements.
Prince William Sen. Chuck Colgan (D-29th), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had a similar but competing tax increase proposal but pulled it after his committee adopted Saslaw’s bill.
“I think it might just add to confusion to have two bills go into the House,” he said.
The likely outcome is that the Senate will adopt some compromise version of the Saslaw bill but that the House of Delegates will waste no time in killing the measure.
The House, which is controlled by anti-tax Republicans, favors audits of VDOT instead of tax increases. A proposal calling for an external audit of VDOT is the dominant House plan, with many delegates maintaining that enough cost-savings could be found at the agency to better fund transportation.
By-and-large, Democrats don’t object to audits of VDOT but maintain that a stable stream of income is also needed.
Other Republican delegates favor adding tolls to existing roads to pay for construction and one toll proposal for Hampton Roads may win the support of the full House, if not the Senate.
The big problem, said Centreville Delegate Tim Hugo (R-40th), is that there is no support for a statewide solution, only for regional projects.
Hugo said he spent the weekend talking to constituents and concluded that three-quarters would be willing to grudgingly accept regional tax increases but only if the money stays in Northern Virginia. There is no desire to raise statewide taxes and share the money.
“A statewide tax will bring down the bill,” he said.
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