Sunday, August 30, 2009
Our blind spot on roads
Elizabeth Strother
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- Following the money trail
- A doctor fights for a single-payer plan
- Keeping it unreal
From the RoundTable blog
Gridlock in Northern Virginia raises no ire in the mountains and valleys of western Virginia.
Warnings that the bridges and tunnels of Hampton Roads could become death traps in a large-scale emergency don't alarm folks around here.
But closed rest stops on the interstate? That's scary -- for no one more so, it seems, than a group of Republican House delegates who wanted to take up the issue at this month's one-day special General Assembly session.
Shut down seven rest areas along Interstate 81, and drivers up and down the Valley of Virginia notice. And complain. A lot.
Enough maybe to awaken voters to how far the state's transportation fund has dwindled and send them, come November, into the voting booth to cast their ballots against the status quo -- which, in the GOP-led Virginia House of Delegates, is to say "no" to new transportation taxes. Good times or bad, makes no difference.
The current steep plunge in revenues can be laid largely to the recession, but it has only advanced a transportation crisis officials warned of even during the commonwealth's go-go growth years. House Republicans turned a deaf ear.
A political problem demands a political solution, the message Democrats must hope voters will take from VDOT's unpopular shutdown of 19 rest stops across the state to save $9 million a year -- a small cut in a transportation budget that has shed more than $3 billion in road construction projects, 1,000 full-time jobs, 450 part-time, and sees more cuts coming this year.
Its roads program caught unprepared for a tanking economy, Virginia finds that safe and convenient highway rest areas have become a luxury it cannot afford.
There is another way to spin the scenario, though, and keep voters' complacency intact: VDOT's penny-pinching, just the medicine the GOP would order, is sheer stupidity here, a simple matter of misplaced priorities. That is obvious by the uproar it has caused.
So, defying an agreement between lawmakers and Gov. Tim Kaine to keep to a two-point legislative agenda for the Aug. 19 special session, Dels. Steve Landes of Weyers Cave and Scott Lingamfelter of Woodbridge signed on with Del. Bob Marshall of Manassas to file a third bill, House Resolution 503: "Requesting the Virginia Department of Transportation to reopen those interstate rest areas closed during July 2009."
It failed 82-7, leaving the measure in the House Rules Committee, where it seems destined to get quick consideration in the 2010 General Assembly -- if it needs to be taken up at all.
Not only are all Virginia House seats up for election this year, but statewide offices, as well. Gubernatorial candidates Bob McDonnell, a Republican, and Creigh Deeds, a Democrat, have dutifully pledged to order VDOT to reopen the rest stops soon after taking office.
I'd like to see that as much as the next driver, but really, isn't all the hullabaloo just a bit self-indulgent, given much bigger transportation problems?
You think those don't affect you? They do -- far more than having to wait till the next exit sign that promises a convenience store after you've passed a rest stop barricade.
Democratic Del. Jim Shuler, who came down from Blacksburg last week to talk to the editorial board about his re-election bid, is a House veteran who's seen the General Assembly change with the mood of the electorate.
"Nobody likes government intrusion of taxes and fees," he said in his slow, calm way, "unless it's something you're doing for me. And then we love it.
"The House of Delegates has been an obstacle for many right things for a number of years. Many moderate Republicans have been ostracized and removed from the fold because they wanted to do the right thing for the state. ... What you're left with is an agenda of 'no' and putting off things you should have done.
"If we'd have made some more progress a few years ago, we could weather this better."
A lot of Virginians might think they'd be weathering the roads crisis in comfort, if only some dumb bureaucrat would cut more fat, tighten VDOT's belt and free up $9 million a year to reopen boarded-up rest areas. In a lot of Virginia, the rest stops and roadside mowing, plowing in the winter, are VDOT. As Shuler put it, "It's what the public sees."
If you don't see your stake in the billions of dollars of statewide construction needs, that doesn't mean you don't have one.
"The public doesn't understand the money that flows out of Northern Virginia and Hampton is redistributed in this part of the state on a fairly equitable basis," Shuler lamented.
Well, fairly equitable if you think redistributing wealth from there to here is fair. Our prosperity rests on theirs, a fact that's harder to accept than the dollars.
Strother is on The Roanoke Times editorial board.
