News and Views

GoDanRiver.com : Virginia Needs a Lockbox for Transportation Dollars

Quick … what’s the first thing to pop into your head when you hear the word “lockbox”?

If you’re a political junkie, it’s that moment from the first presidential debate in the 2000 election on Oct. 3 when Vice President Al Gore proposed making Social Security dollars legally untouchable whenever Washington politicians without intestinal fortitude needed to money to cover operating holes in the federal budget. “Saturday Night Live” turned the moment into a bit of political and historical lore when Darrell Hammond, portraying Gore, uttered the word, drawing it out to five or six syllables in a skit that wound up hanging around Gore’s neck like an albatross for the final four weeks of the race.

Despite the chuckles we got 17 years ago from that skit, the idea of a lockbox to protect vitally important, single-purpose state or federal funds from spineless politicians with sticky fingers is an attractive one.

In Virginia, one of the biggest single-purpose funds, other than Virginia Retirement System’s multi-billion dollar pension investments, is the Transportation Fund. Gas taxes we pay at the pump flow into this fund, which is supposed to pay for key transportation projects across the state: passenger and commuter rail, public transportation and, of course, highway infrastructure.

The key phrase there is “supposed to pay.”

Over the last 27 years, one governor and one General Assembly after another, both Democrats and Republicans, have seen the Transportation Fund as little more than a pile of cash to tap when there’s a gap in the budget between expenditures and revenues and they have no will either to cut spending or raise taxes.

Just consider these “raids,” as chronicled by AAA Mid-Atlantic, the powerful lobbying organization that champions the legislative interests of motorists:

» In 1991, in the recession triggered by the first Iraq war, Gov. Doug Wilder yanked $200 million from the transportation fund to balance the state budget.

» Eleven years later in 2002, as his signature “car tax” repeal was plunging the state into the red, Gov. Jim Gilmore proposed expropriating $317 million from the fund to avoid having to admit his “car tax” repeal was nothing more than a costly campaign stunt.

» In 2003, Gov. Mark Warner adopted Gilmore’s plan to raid the fund for $317 million to leverage the Republican-led General Assembly into accepting changes to the car tax repeal of 1998. While he was at it, Warner also steered $143 million from specific projects in the Virginia Transportation Act of 2000 to balance the budget.

» Four years later in 2007, during a dip in state revenues that presaged the onslaught of the Great Recession, Gov. Tim Kaine signed off on steering $180 million from transportation projects to balancing the budget.

With this history in mind, Del. Dave LaRock, a Northern Virginia Republican, began his quest to constitutionally protect Virginia’s transportation fund from future raids. First elected to the House of Delegates in 2013, LaRock has championed amending the Virginia Constitution to spell out that transportation fund money is untouchable for any purposes other than transportation needs.

In the 2018 Assembly session, the House voted overwhelmingly, 78-21, to send LaRock’s proposed amendment to Senate for action.

Virginia’s constitutional amendment process requires approval by successive sessions, with an intervening state general election — as in November 2017 — in between before an amendment goes to state voters for their final say. The Assembly approved the amendment proposal in the 2017 session, meaning approval by the 2018 session was the only thing standing between it and final action by voters Election Day 2018.

But shockingly, the Senate Finance Committee killed the amendment on a narrow 7-9 vote. Central Virginia’s Sen. Steve Newman, one of the strongest voices in the Assembly on transportation issues, was one of the seven senators voting to approve the amendment. One of the nine voting to kill it was Sen. Frank Ruff, a Republican whose district includes parts of Campbell and Pittsylvania counties and parts of Danville.

The amendment’s death is saddening indeed. Hundreds of millions of dollars Virginians pay in gas taxes, supposedly for transportation needs alone, remain vulnerable to legislators and governors with sticky fingers and weak political spines. The commonwealth needs Del. LaRock’s amendment, and we hope he won’t give up the good government fight in the 2019 Assembly session.

Read the story on GoDanRiver.com.
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