Facing a $618 million budget shortfall, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine wants to “borrow” $180 million from the Transportation Trust Fund (TTF) to spend on other programs. This is the same kind of irresponsible behavior that helped dig a huge financial pothole in the commonwealth’s road maintenance and construction programs beginning more than a decade ago.
The governor promises that the money will be returned when state revenue supposedly doubles by 2009, as he predicts it will. But his repayment pledge rings hollow because Kaine promised before being elected that he would support a constitutional amendment to put TTF off-limits to exactly the same kind of raid he’s now mounting.
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Past borrowing from the TTF prevented the commonwealth from keeping up with its road maintenance and construction obligations. That greatly eroded the public’s trust in state government and worsened the maddening gridlock afflicting commuters, especially in the Washington region. Kaine’s proposal is a particular affront to residents of Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, who are now being asked to pay higher regional taxes and fees to reduce local traffic congestion — supposedly because Richmond doesn’t have enough money to help them out.
But if Kaine has his way, $180 million specifically set aside for transportation will be siphoned off, which means that the two areas of the state that generate the most revenue and have been continually shortchanged when it came to congestion relief are being played for chumps yet again.
Understandably, Kaine wants a budget that reflects his own priorities, which include more funding for the environment, mental health, subsidized health insurance, and his signature pre-K program. But a state that can’t afford to maintain its own highways and bridges has no business providing state-funded preschool or any of the other $4 billion in increased spending (half of it using borrowed money) that Kaine included in his latest budget proposal.
If Kaine wants to leave a lasting legacy, he should find the money elsewhere in the $78 billion biennial budget that has been growing much faster than population increases or the cost of living would dictate. Instead of borrowing to spend more, Kaine should prune state government, outsource functions that could be more efficiently provided by the private sector and cut more than $300 million from failing programs in order to free up funds for new initiatives. Virginia simply cannot afford to spend billions more when billions less are coming in. If the commonwealth doesn’t do some judicious housecleaning now, it never will.
