America’s oldest continuous legislative body once had a well-deserved reputation for fiscal restraint bordering on austerity. In recent years, however, Virginia’s General Assembly has morphed into something more closely approximating the spendthrift Congress in the nation’s capital.
Even looming economic storm clouds did not stop legislators in Richmond last week from increasing state spending yet again. The state budget has doubled over the past decade, growing eight to 10 times faster than population. Despite this spending explosion — which over the years has been approved by Democrats and Republicans — the record $77 billion biennial budget just passed does not come close to solving Northern Virginia’s traffic congestion crisis. That problem again has been deferred to a “special session.”
The previous special session gave us HR3202 — a Frankenbill whose main provisions were the so-called “abusive-driver fees” and new taxes imposed by the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority. Then public outrage forced repeal of the fees, and the state Supreme Court rightly declared NVTA unconstitutional because its members weren’t elected. So now, with the new budget, it’s back to square one.
Prospects for congestion relief are dim because state spending is out of whack and most state legislators think the only solution is higher taxes. In 1981, the top three priorities in the $5.9 billion Virginia budget were pretty balanced: $1.9 billion for education, $1.8 billion for social services and $924 million for transportation. Virginia now spends $11.3 billion on education, $10.1 billion on social services but just $3.4 billion on transportation, according to the Joint Legislative and Review Commission. This imbalance is the crux of the rapidly worsening congestion crisis facing Northern Virginians.
To fund congestion relief, state leaders must either change their spending priorities or make all Virginians pay higher taxes. The just-adopted state budget doesn’t change the priorities, so unless legislators are willing to revisit their latest decisions, they’ve left themselves only the tax increase option for the special session. This is an outrageous situation in a state that a mere four years ago passed a $1.3 billion tax increase, the largest in state history.
If Virginia’s political leaders, including those in both political parties, are serious about reducing and ultimately eliminating traffic congestion, they will use their upcoming special session to restore balance to state spending. If they can’t or won’t make those admittedly tough decisions, Virginia officials ought to at least have the guts to tell voters they aren’t paying enough taxes to state government in Richmond.
