Commentary
To stay the best, Virginia must do better in funding transportation

by Bob Chase
for Virginia Business
April 2007

Forbes.com has rated Virginia as the best place to do business. The Pew Charitable Trusts-sponsored Government Performance Project rates Virginia as the best managed state. Education Week magazine claims Virginia best prepares children to succeed in life.

Perhaps.

The extent to which such recognition is credible will be measured by whether Virginia’s elected officials step up to the plate this month to address our transportation funding crisis.

A state that lacks the political will to fund basic transportation needs is not a good place for business, is not well managed and is not a place where young people will have future opportunities for the success parents want for them.

Few who voted for the last major transportation funding initiative in 1986 considered that package to be a long-term solution. No one thought 21 years would pass before the Virginia General Assembly might next invest serious new money in transportation. Everyone assumed legislators would add supplements every few years, but they have not.

Since 1986, the commonwealth’s population has increased by 30 percent, registered vehicles by 61 percent and daily miles traveled on our road network by 74 percent — while the network itself has increased by only 7 percent and the purchasing power of its transportation dollar has declined by 44 percent. In recent years, most of the new road mileage has come from subdivision streets, not main arteries.

Few Virginians realize that the commonwealth operates 58,000 miles of roads and 12,000 bridges — the nation’s third largest state highway network behind Texas and North Carolina. Much of the system’s maintenance and construction depends on Virginia’s gas tax — the nation’s ninth lowest at 17.5 cents a gallon.

State elected officials often cite the importance of Virginia’s two major economic engines — the Port at Hampton Roads and Washington Dulles International Airport — to job generation and the commonwealth’s future economic well-being. However, the future economic power of these engines is heavily dependent upon improved accessibility. Absent significant new sustainable funding, neither the port nor Dulles Airport will come close to achieving its potential.

The HB 3202 Conference Report legislation now on Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s desk is neither as comprehensive nor as generous as supporters contend, nor as flawed and insignificant as its critics argue.

Just a few years ago, any suggestion of a statewide funding package was “off the table” in the House of Delegates. The current proposal includes $600 million per year in statewide dollars plus borrowing a total of $2.5 billion in annual installments of $300 million. Hardly enough, but a significant improvement.

The $400 million per year for Northern Virginia and $200 million per year for Hampton Roads are not insignificant sums. The Hampton Roads regional package better targets essential regional priorities, while Northern Virginia’s package is more diluted and distributed across broader geo-political lines.

As in 1986, the current package is a “catch-up” initiative that can help correct years of bipartisan neglect. It won’t fix Interstate 81, build the regional bypasses and Potomac River bridges Northern Virginia needs or address other statewide strategic issues.

Anyone who claims this package “solves” the commonwealth’s or any region’s transportation needs fails to understand the magnitude of the problem. Virginia will add another 1.7 million people in the next 25 years. About 1 million new residents will live in Northern Virginia, mostly outside the Capital Beltway where planned infrastructure construction is decades behind schedule.

A 2004 General Assembly-mandated study, known as the VTrans 2025 Multimodal Long-Range Transportation Study, pegged Virginia’s total unfunded transportation needs over the next two decades at $108 billion or about $5 billion per year. Even if our most urgent needs could be met with half that amount, the commonwealth remains tens of billions short of its requirements.

Every year’s delay means taxpayers pay hundreds of millions more in higher construction costs.

Virginia will never get a secure handle on its serious transportation funding problem until politicians come to grips with the need for broader-based mechanisms such as gasoline, income, mileage or sales taxes paid by those who benefit from improvements.

Until then, to the extent HB 3202 can be improved upon this year and still command majority support in both houses, it should be. Elements that can’t be resolved must be addressed in the future.

HB 3202 is a start. One that’s long overdue and an opportunity that must not be lost.

It’s time to act. Virginia’s future can’t wait.

Bob Chase is president of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, a business-citizen coalition founded in 1987 to promote greater public awareness of and involvement in transportation solutions.