Tommy Denton

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Huddled last week to discuss a worrisome transportation budget, the Clarke County Board of Supervisors just thought they had problems.

By the time Jeff Lineberry, a Virginia Department of Transportation engineer, finished his presentation to the meeting up in Berryville last Tuesday, the supervisors learned that the bad news they expected was actually 20 percent worse than they had feared.

For the Clarke County six-year plan, the state contribution to transportation projects would decline from the previously anticipated total of $2.9 million to about $2.2 million, from 2008 to 2013.

"This is not a message I wanted to share," Lineberry told the supervisors, as reported in The Winchester Star. He noted an increase in construction costs and a drop in tax revenues and user fees for the state reduction.

Multiply that message time and again across Virginia's rural regions. As Lineberry put it, funding reductions from the state result in major hits against "low-priority" secondary roads.

For Virginians who miss the subtlety of the contentions by lawmakers who refuse to raise sufficient state taxes to finance needed services, those millions living beyond the urban core have been deemed "low priority."

The so-called compromise for the current state transportation bill awaiting Gov. Tim Kaine's action effectively laughs off the comprehensive, long-term needs for roads, highways, freight and passenger rail, and ports development.

The alleged plan is more like a doily clumsily knotted from rotted burlap rather than fine silk tatted artfully into lace. Not only is it ugly, it's distorted by being bunched up in knots at two sides and bears large, gaping voids in the remainder of the piece. Being inadequately and shabbily configured, it ultimately will fray and fall apart.

Then there are those political visionaries who proclaim that, as did Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling in an essay for The Washington Times last week, spending increases to finance statewide transportation needs should reside substantially with local elected officials who demonstrate the moral fiber to increase local taxes.

By such reasoning, locals should demonstrate the courage to convince voters, despite the obvious absurdity of the "compromise," to abandon the principle of meeting statewide needs through economies of scale.

That level of "courage" would be unlike the Republican leadership among state politicians, particularly in the House of Delegates, who defy logic by refusing to increase the gasoline excise tax, pass the buck to the localities and then quickly burrow into their dank nests in Richmond.

Now that three of the prudent advocates of sound public finance have announced their impending retirements from the state Senate -- Republicans John Chichester of Northumberland County, Russell Potts of Winchester and Charles Hawkins of Chatham -- the state faces the dire possibility those wise counsels could be replaced by senators more sympathetic to the myopic minions in the House.

Ultimately, that will be a judgment for the voters in the respective rural districts awaiting further victimization by what passes for legislative leadership in Richmond.

Here in Western Virginia, local officials can sympathize with those supervisors in largely rural Clarke County, east of Winchester. There, under current projections, a "new" priority project -- others had to be dropped -- to upgrade a road with turn lanes near a planned new high school would not reach full funding until 2017.

Most assuredly, congestion in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads should be relieved. But some voices already are reaching upper-level decibels in opposition to the demand that the state effectively abandon localities to their own devices for projects that should be knitted together strategically to sustain, extend and strengthen the entire state transportation infrastructure.

The continuing determination of House leaders and some other myopic obstructionists like Lt. Gov. Bolling to avoid increasing the gas tax and to insist on raiding the general fund to help retire $2.5 billion in highway bonded indebtedness reflects a political leadership allergic to leadership.

A physician who prescribed for an ailing patient double doses of leeching and oxygen-deprivation would be sued for malpractice. Why Virginia politicians persist in the governmental equivalent of malpractice without retribution at the ballot box remains a curiosity.

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I apologize for the careless oversight that led to my misspelling U.S. Rep. Frank R. Wolf's name in my column of March 20.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.