News and Views

The Free Lance-Star : EDITORIAL: Put trust back in Transportation Trust Fund

IN 2013, after decades of neglect, the Virginia General Assembly finally passed a $6 billion transportation bill. This was serious money that funded many projects that had been left on the shelf for lack of funding. But there’s still no guarantee that the revenue currently being deposited in the Transportation Trust Fund will be there to fund critical transportation projects in the future.

Transportation projects are extremely capital-intensive, with some requiring hundreds of millions of dollars to complete. But saving up such money is difficult, especially when politicians looking for a quick budget fix can raid the so-called Trust Fund whenever they please.

A bill sponsored by Del. Dave LaRock, R-Hamilton, would have put an end to that by placing a referendum on the Nov. 6, 2018, ballot. Voters could either approve or reject a constitutional amendment requiring that all revenues dedicated to the Transportation Trust Fund from gas and motor vehicle taxes would be spent only on transportation-related projects.

The bill had an escape clause, specifying that the General Assembly could borrow from the fund if a supermajority of two-thirds of the members in each chamber approved, but stipulating that such a loan would have to be paid back “with reasonable interest” within four years.

“Virginia is moving forward with responsible transportation investment, delivering long-needed projects and catching up on deferred maintenance. The time has come to ensure that transportation funding is secure so that we can continue our solid progress providing the infrastructure Virginia needs to improve commerce, safety, and quality of life,” LaRock said.

On Feb. 8, the proposed referendum was approved by the House of Delegates by a 73-25 vote. Most area delegates voted for it, including Mark Cole, R-Fredericksburg, Buddy Fowler, R- Glen Allen, Nick Freitas, R-Culpeper, Bobby Orrock, R-Thornburg, Margaret Ransone, R-Westmoreland, and Bob Thomas, R-Fredericksburg. Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, D-Woodbridge, voted “no”.

But the bill died in the Senate Finance Committee on a 7-9 vote. Sens. Jill Holzman Vogel, R-Warrenton, Ryan McDougle, R-Mechanicsville, and Richard Stuart, R-Montross, all voted in favor of putting the proposed constitutional amendment before voters this fall. But they were outvoted by Democrats on the committee, who were joined by prominent Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment, R-Williamsburg, and Emmett Hanger, R-Mount Solon, co-chairman of the Finance Committee.

It’s easy to see why some of the committee members would be against any legislation that ties their hands. But the Transportation Trust Fund has been raided so many times in the past—in 1991, 2002, 2003 and 2007, under both Republican and Democratic governors—that it is no longer worthy of the name.


To make matters worse, the same proposed constitutional amendment—which needed to pass the General Assembly during two consecutive sessions with an election in between before it went on the ballot—was approved by the GOP-led House and Senate last year. The Senate Finance Committee’s disapproval of a bill it already passed in 2017 was completely unwarranted.

“AAA believes that without protection, money raised for transportation is in danger of being pilfered in the future,” Martha Mitchell Meade, manager of AAA Mid-Atlantic Public & Government Affairs, correctly pointed out in a statement. “From the need to balance the budget, to ever-increasing competition for money to fund a wide variety of current and potential future areas, lawmakers will be forever tempted, without a lockbox, to take monies that are needed for Virginia’s transportation infrastructure.”

The Senate Finance Committee’s last-ditch refusal to let voters decide whether the taxes and fees they pay to fund transportation improvements should be used only for that purpose was as cowardly as it was reprehensible. But it does explain why the commonwealth’s roads and highways are in the state they’re in.

A similar case involved the Virginia Lottery. In 1987, voters were told that lottery profits would be used exclusively to fund education. But from 1990 to 1998, much of the money was diverted to the General Fund. It took a constitutional amendment approved by 84 percent of voters in 2000 to ensure that all lottery profits were spent on public education—a provision that can only be overridden by a four-fifths vote in both chambers of the General Assembly. Even so, local school districts still got less than 30 percent of the $1.99 billion generated by lottery sales in fiscal 2017.

The Transportation Trust Fund was likewise created by the General Assembly in 1986 during a special session after politicians in Richmond made the same sort of empty promise to voters. Thirty-two years later, it’s time to make the “trust” part a reality.

Read the story on the Free Lance-Star. 
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