Republican Party gubernatorial nominee Bob McDonnell seems to agree now that Virginia needs to invest more in its transportation system. That’s good news.
Two questions. One, can we trust somebody who has been a key player on the team that has been blocking substantive progress on transportation solutions to do what he is now saying he wants to do to get Virginia moving? And two, is what he saying he wants to do going to get the job done?
“We cannot create new jobs and spark an economic resurgence if Virginians are sitting stuck in traffic. For too long we have had gridlock at the Capitol, followed by continued gridlock on our highways. That has to end. It is time to say yes to new and creative transportation solutions that will get projects built, decisions made, jobs created and Virginia moving again,” McDonnell said in rolling out his transportation plan, which does offer some interesting, to say the least, ideas to provide funding for transportation improvements, even if they sound to me like, yep, tax increases.
The line items in the plan from the McDonnell camp include most significantly proposed legislation to “dedicate (a) percentage of new revenue growth to transportation. What doesn’t get your attention at first glance but does at second are the words “increased revenue” and “new revenue growth.” Republicans in recent years have referred to any “new revenue growth” as approximating effective tax increases and used evidence of growth in revenues as the basis for calls for tax- and fee-rate cuts to get things back to a revenue-neutral state.
I have to wonder how the dedication of “new revenue growth” to anything resembling an operation of government will sell if Republicans get control of the governor’s mansion and if they keep control of the House of Delegates, which hasn’t met a government program it didn’t want to starve for years now.
And then there’s the issue of what would happen if the part about “new revenue growth” were to somehow come to fruition even in spite of what political common sense would tell us. “(N)ew revenue growth” is code for growth in general-fund revenues, i.e. the pot of money that funds public education and public safety and the rest of state government.
So I want to give McDonnell an A for effort, because it does seem to me that he at least gets it, finally, that we can’t keep pretending as Republicans have been wanting us to pretend for years that we either don’t have a transportation problem that needs addressing or that we can address the problem without spending some money.
The details, unfortunately, are lacking in substance, and aren’t unfamiliar to those of us who have been watching the Republicans sell their shell game with transportation while our roads infrastructure crumbles around us.
– Column by Chris Graham
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