Panel cuts road projects; Kaine offers a fix

RICHMOND — With lawmakers returning Monday to consider transportation funding, the state’s highway planning panel cut hundreds of projects for lack of money Thursday.
A few hours later, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine unveiled his proposed fix. His bill would generate nearly $1.1 billion a year for statewide highway maintenance and for new projects in the most populated regions.
The Commonwealth Transportation Board voted unanimously to divert $2.75 billion in the next six years from new road construction to cover soaring costs of maintaining the state’s network of highways and bridges, a problem Kaine called “significant and undeniable.”
That means 503 road building projects the CTB approved a year ago and which were already under way are now either dead or delayed indefinitely. Another 104 projects the board had identified as priorities for inclusion this year were dropped.
State law requires the state to fund upkeep and repair ahead of new projects.
The General Assembly returns to Richmond on Monday for a special session the Democratic governor convened solely to consider transportation funding. But Kaine and the Republican-run House of Delegates have opposite priorities, and neither has so far found the other’s acceptable.
The legislation he introduced Thursday is almost unchanged from the proposal he outlined six weeks ago, before he embarked on a series of town hall-style meetings in 10 localities to promote his plan. The last was Thursday night in Fredericksburg.
Major statewide provisions would raise the cost of registering a car by $10 a year and boost the titling from 3 percent of a car’s purchase price to 4 percent. The revenue, about $520 million a year by 2014, would be restricted to maintenance of the state’s 13,000 bridges — on average 47 years old — and nearly 58,000 miles of highway.
“This will enable us to quit cannibalizing the construction budget and taking money out of these key local projects that communities have waited on, in some cases, for years,” Kaine said.
People who sell homes in Virginia would pay an additional 25 cents per every $100 of the sale price, a move that would cost a homeowner an additional $625 on the sale of a $250,000 house. It would generate about $155 million a year, most of it for mass transit and rail projects.
Kaine’s bill also increases the retail sales tax by 1 percentage point in northern Virginia and Hampton Roads exclusively to fund new highway projects in the two regions most gridlocked by traffic.
The only change in his bill is minuscule: it phases in the automobile titling tax in increments of one-half percent over the first half of 2009.
Republican House leaders have said a statewide tax boost is dead. They accused Kaine of alarming people with inflated maintenance cost projections to win passage of a tax with the economy reeling.
“We’re in a recession, and if we’re not technically it sure feels like it if you’re in the home sales business, which he (Kaine) is singling out, or the auto sales business, which he has singled out,” said House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford.
What they do support is approving regional proposals, then adjourning. It’s unlikely the Democratic-dominated Senate would approve such a thing, but Kaine has warned that he won’t settle for any measure that doesn’t include statewide maintenance revenue.
The standoff and the long odds of a compromise in next week’s session were clear in the dejection among CTB members, all appointed by Democratic governors, before they approved their pared-down road authorization plan for the next six years.
“I’ll vote to approve this, but with a broken heart,” said board member Jim D. Bowie, who represents the Bristol transportation district.
Northern Virginia district board member Douglas Koelemay compared it to “getting one shoe when we really need two shoes.” And Richmond District board member Gerald McCarthy said it was “time for adults to step up” with serious proposals, an appeal to House members that Kaine picked up on in the afternoon.
“Adult leadership means taking adult responsibilities to solve significant challenges,” Kaine said in remarks that clearly portrayed House Republicans as the obstacle. “I believe that the only excuse for failure at this point is if the majority of the body has decided that they don’t want to solve the problem.”
“The House is, frankly, where the challenge is,” he said later.
Several Democratic legislators joined Kaine in presenting his bill; no Republicans were there. The GOP has accused Kaine repeatedly of staging the special session to make transportation an issue Democrats can use next year to win the six seats necessary to wrest control of the House from them.
Howell said it’s unfair to portray House Republicans as obstructionists when, he said, Kaine’s bill has little support in either party. Senate Democrats, he noted, prefer a 5-cent, five-year gasoline tax increase to Kaine’s bill.
With gasoline prices over $4 a gallon and rising, a fuel tax boost is politically risky, but Kaine said if it provides the needed statewide maintenance money, he would sign it.
“There’s nothing I’m taking off the table,” he said when asked about new gasoline taxes.