Sunday, June 14, 2009

Deeds And The Transportation Formula

One of the areas of Virginia government in dire need of reform is the transportation funding formula. It's rural bias has made for good roads in the western part of the Commonwealth while Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads choke on congestion. Conventional wisdom is that population shifts will mean more General Assembly seats for urban areas with redistricting, allowing for the formula to eventually be changed.

Just one problem: the Democratic nominee for Governor is from rural Virginia. In fact, the smallest county in the Commonwealth. Any attempt to correct the funding imbalance would probably be met with a veto by a Governor Deeds.

Just another reason to vote for Bob McDonnell for Governor. A vote for Deeds is a vote to continue to send our Gas Tax revenue to rural Virginia while we struggle to get by.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would love to hear someone from NOVA make the case that the region is struggling. The region has the jobs, the economic power and of course the population density to pay for infrastructure spending had they supported the endeavor to form transportation districts. How much will NOVA get in funding eventually for the tunnel in and around Tysons or whichever direction they finally go with.
Rural Virginia has one thing going for it and that is the roads it has which are required for the kost part because of safety reasons. If NOVA wants to curnb the number of people on its roads than maybe there should be a push in the localities to curb zoning of new housing bringing more and more people to the area!!!!

Anonymous said...

This post displays pretty much zero knowledge of Deeds's record on the issue. He's voiced a lot of support for providing more funding for Northern Virginia transportation, even if that would provide less funding for his home region.

Avenging Archangel said...

Anon 1:22,

In Nova much - including relationships - revolves around traffic patterns. While their growth has been great, it's unsustainable without Transportation help.

Much of the land is already zoned for growth, so to "curb zoning" wouldn't help.