While we still chew over the details of the hundreds of millions of unused dollars the VDOT audit discovered last week, Steve Rossie points out that during the last General Assembly session, VDOT pleaded poverty during the debate over a property rights bill patroned by Del. Ward Armstrong.
The bill in question, HB652, would have:
Provide[d] that any restriction, change, or loss of access to or from property taken under the power of eminent domain shall be considered as an element in assessing the damages to the property for the purposes of determining just compensation.
Under current Virginia law, property owners are barred from presenting evidence to a jury of such damages and juries are not allowed to consider it in determining compensation.
VDOT lamented in a last-minute fiscal impact statement (added to the measure only after a House subcommittee voted unanimously in favor of the bill) that it would cost the agency roughly $50 million over six years — money the agency didn’t have, was unlikely to ever have and, if forced to pay, would threaten other cash-starved projects of essential funds.
Local governments, who are notorious for their antipathy toward property rights, carried VDOT’s water before the relevant legislative bodies, and succeeded in finally killing the measure before the Senate Finance committee, thanks in no small part to thin-skinned Senate Republicans.
But it was Sen. Majority leader Dick Saslaw who ultimately drove the stake through the bill’s heart — and Armstrong’s — using the bill’s potential costs as his reason.
Now, months later, we find VDOT has been banking hundreds of unspent millions and could not only have afforded to compensate property owners for whatever land the agency condemned, but done so with little or no effect on its other operations.
But let’s assume none of these funds could have been used for compensation. VDOT could easily find additional monies if it ended its practice of wasting taxpayer dollars in court cases it has already lost.
Perhaps another audit is in order to discover just how much money has been piddled away on outside counsel, who has every incentive to keep the meter running. We may just discover even more savings are there, waiting to be claimed.
