Friday, December 29, 2006
Editorial: The House GOP's land-use grab
Taxophobic House Republicans rightly want to get on board with smart-growth ideas. Shifting blame for their failures onto localities, though, is wrong.
From the RoundTable blog
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Virginia's House leaders have made a bold move, all right.
Their proposals to tie local land-use decisions to transportation costs put smart-growth ideas on the state agenda for the first time in a serious way, challenging powerful development lobbies. The shift in priorities is years overdue.
Bolder still -- shameless, really -- is the House GOP's attempt to shift blame for the state's transportation crisis from itself, where it belongs, onto localities by framing a plan lawmakers unveiled Wednesday as an effort to force local governments to act responsibly.
As if local officials have been approving leap-frog land development willy-nilly -- creating new roads and new demands on existing roads, driving up transportation costs -- in defiance of state incentives to act otherwise.
Localities have, indeed, allowed growth to sprawl willy-nilly across the countryside -- in part because the state's strong property-rights guarantees sharply limit their ability to manage it.
The General Assembly has been slow to strengthen the localities' hand.
Now Republican delegates propose to hand off the costs of maintaining new subdivision roads to local governments or homeowners associations, while continuing to deny localities the authority to block new subdivisions based on traffic impacts.
And while all communities would be affected by the shift in road maintenance costs, The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot reports that most economic incentives, such as impact fees to discourage development outside of designated high-density zones, would be targeted to fast-growth localities in Northern Virginia and Tidewater.
Roanoke County, where most subdivisions are being built on land already zoned for residential use, would be handed what now would be the state's bill for road maintenance with no ability to choose not to incur the added costs.
Gov. Tim Kaine's spokesman noted approvingly Wednesday that "the executive and legislative branches are rowing in the same direction," with a bipartisan consensus developing around the need to link land-use decisions with their impact on transportation.
Yet Kaine spokesman Kevin Hall also noted, "We need to be mindful that we are not simply shifting the state's responsibility to local governments."
Indeed.
Virginia should empower localities with planning tools to discourage development where the infrastructure to support it is inadequate or nonexistent.
Virginia also should provide transportation funding adequate to cover existing and future needs, and this it does not do, thanks to House Republicans who refuse to consider new taxes to pay for burgeoning demands on its road system.
The state cannot just reform or just tax its way out of its transportation mess. It will have to do both.
