Fairfax County supervisors are pushing state lawmakers to find new ways to drum up money for badly needed transportation projects in North Virginia.
County leaders say Virginia’s looming transportation crunch — $4.6 billion in cuts through 2015 — will put the burden on them to fund even the most routine of transportation projects usually covered by the state — something they are ill prepared to do facing a $316 million budget gap of their own.
They are pushing for the reinstatement of about $300 million annually in Northern Virginia revenues tied to eliminated regional transportation funding sources. They also are calling for 100 percent of their contribution to additional statewide revenues.
At their meeting Tuesday, supervisors said the General Assembly needed to adopt new statewide transportation revenue sources to augment stagnant highway and transit funds.
Fairfax County spokeswoman Merni Fitzgerald said staff are reviewing current General Assembly transportation bills and that a recommendation for the county to lobby for could be made at Friday’s legislative committee meeting. Even if the transportation funding is not resolved by the end of the legislative session — as some have predicted — supervisors alluded to the possibility of a special session in the fall to address the matter.
The region’s 2006 TransAction 2030 Long-Range transportation plan estimated Northern Virginia alone would need $700 million a year in new transportation funding to keep up with increasingly clogged and beaten roads.
With that in mind, supervisors said they trimmed their legislative priorities this year to reflect the dire budget and the priority it would take over issues that have become seemingly trivial.
“We kept our initiatives at a minimum to focus on the state budget,” said Supervisor Jeff McKay, D-Lee, highlighting the scaled-back priorities at Tuesday’s meeting.
The board’s other top priorities for the General Assembly are K-12 education funding, preventing restrictions on local taxation and preserving local land use authority.
