Virginia will sell about $500 million in transportation bonds this month, pumping money into road and rail projects sitting in the state’s six-year blueprint.
Those funds, with other bonds planned over the next two years, will pay for a host of improvements, including the Metrorail extension to Washington Dulles International Airport and the Route 29 Gainesville interchange at Interstate 66. The new debt is authorized by one of the few surviving provisions in the General Assembly’s 2007 transportation package.
Gov. Bob McDonnell heralded the bond sale as a example of his administration’s progress on fixing the state’s transportation woes. But the action has more to do with timing than anything else; the state is able to take on more debt because it has finally paid off enough of the transportation bonds taken out under Gov. Jim Gilmore.
Because enough of those old bonds are paid down and previously tied-up revenues freed, “we have some headroom to issue new debt,” said Virginia Department of Transportation spokesman Jeff Caldwell.
The Kaine administration had been constrained by the outstanding debt and had forecast that enough money would be available by the summer of 2010 to issue the $500 million in new bonds, said Bob Chase, president of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance.
“It’s good news,” Chase said. “What it means is that a lot of projects under the six-year plan will be completed.”
That plan has been repeatedly stripped down in recent years as transportation revenues shriveled in a down economy.
The bond sale represents a rare bright spot in a three-year-old transportation law — H.B. 3202 — widely considered to be a failure. The package created massive new “abuser fees” on bad and dangerous drivers, which were repealed after a public uproar, and empowered non-elected regional authorities to collect taxes, which the Virginia Supreme Court tossed out as unconstitutional. Among the surviving parts of the legislation, the state dedicated one-third of insurance premium taxes to pay for transportation debt.
