Firmly rejecting the Virginia Senate’s determined — but unconstitutional — attempt to embed $3.5 billion in new taxes in the state budget, the House of Delegates finally prevailed in this year’s historic stalemate. A newly unified House led by Speaker William Howell, R-Stafford, insisted that the 2006-08 biennial spending plan due March 11 be based on existing revenues — not tax hikes that were never approved by either chamber. Last week, after a 133-day stare-down, the Senate finally backed down, as The Examiner predicted it would.
The Senate’s reluctant retreat is also a setback for Gov. Tim Kaine, who strongly backed the tax increases proposal and was reportedly making plans to seize additional power to keep the state running if no agreement was reached by the July 1 deadline. During last year’s gubernatorial campaign, Kaine promised he would seek no tax increases until a constitutional amendment limited use of the Transportation Trust Fund to transportation improvements only. That promise proved to be hollow.
Howell says House Republicans agree to continue the current special session or attend a new one later on “to explore a wide-range of options, including those that eschew the easy, reflexive and too-often-utilized route of increasing taxes.” But not even a special session will force lawmakers to make the state’s No. 1 problem the first item of business they address during the budget process. The fact that transportation has to be considered separately means that it’s not really their top priority.
The lack of adequate funding for what is unarguably one of the state’s primary responsibilities is a direct result of years of pass-the-buck political culture coupled with regular raids on the Transportation Trust Fund. With a $74 billion biennial budget that’s been growing 16 percent every two years, a mere two years after the largest tax increase in Virginia history and with a whopping $1.5 billion surplus, it’s insulting to ask taxpayers to send Richmond even one penny more.
Transportation is underfunded only because lawmakers spend billions of tax dollars on everything else. That’s why the commonwealth has a continuing budgetary crisis. And it will never be resolved by doing the same things over and over again while expecting different results. The last time Richmond addressed the transportation issue head-on was 1986. Nobody today is willing to make deep cuts in superfluous and unnecessary spending that a comprehensive transportation solution demands.
If legislators need help finding additional money for roads and transit, they should begin with the “2005 VirginiaPiglet Book” published by the Gainesville-based Virginia Institute for Public Policy, which identifies $2.4 billion in wasteful spending, including $300 million that could be saved every year just by imitating the U.S. Department of Transportation’s innovative approaches to road maintenance contracting. That’s $1.2 billion extra in just four years, and, as the late Sen. Everett Dirksen used to say, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
