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Dan Kegley/Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine was in Southwest Virginia Tuesday promoting his plan for boosting transportation revenue ahead of a special legislative session in June. Detractors, including some Democrats, are not waiting a month to open fire on the proposal.

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Kaine campaigns for transportation plan in Marion

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Virginia’s continued economic development depends on increasing revenues for transportation, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine told a gathering of about 50 people in Marion Tuesday.
The governor is proposing some $1 billion in new taxes and fees in a series of town hall meetings leading up to a special session of the legislature June 23.
“I acknowledge that this is a tough time to talk about more money for anything,” Kaine said. “Families are stretched, businesses are stretched, governments are stretched. But you don’t grow the economy without growing transportation infrastructure.”
Kaine is campaigning to promote his three-part plan to raise transportation revenues, plainly asking citizens to support the plan and urging their legislators to do likewise.
Without his plan’s adoption, he said, the Virginia Department of Transportation will have to cut its current Six-Year Plan by $1.1 billion, shelving many road projects and killing others entirely.
“That’s taking an awful lot of projects off the books,” Kaine said, speaking before a large screen onto which a ceiling-mounted projector displayed related text and graphics.
Kaine said the crisis in commonwealth transportation funding is rooted in higher maintenance costs and insufficient revenues. The shortfall is due in part to Virginia’s relatively low tax rates fund transportation.
Kaine said the state’s 3 percent motor vehicle sales tax is well below the national average of 4.58 percent. Retail sales tax, at 5 percent, is below the national 6.02 percent average. And the state’s portion of taxes taken at the gasoline pump, 17.5 cents per gallon, falls below national average, he said. In Virginia, motorists pay local, state and federal gasoline taxes totaling 37.7 cents per gallon, but the nation averages 45.8 cents.
“We can’t have all revenue sources below average and have a great transportation system,” Kaine said.
The governor’s transportation plan prioritizes revenues to improve road maintenance – “safety first,” Kaine repeated. It calls for regional improvements in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, and increased investment in rail transportation for passengers and freight, local mass transit systems and vanpools in rural areas.
Kaine proposes to fund maintenance by increasing the automobile sales tax from 3 to 4 percent – still .5 percent below the national average, he said. He wants to add $10 to motorist’s current $39 annual vehicle registration fee. Combined, those measures “can fill in the maintenance deficit,” Kaine said.
Without his plan, by 2014 that deficit will amount to nearly $600 million. With his plan, the deficit that year will be under $100 million, Kaine said.
An additional 1 percent regional sales tax would be used to pay for transportation development in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads where several projects now under way span or go beneath waterways, driving up costs, he said.
To pay for transit and rail investments, the General Assembly proposed increasing the grantor’s tax levied on property sales from 10 cents per $100 to 50 cents in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. Kaine counter-proposes a 40-cent rate statewide, he said, would “raise $140 million the first year.”
Support for those parts of the state, the economic engines for the entire state, will be good for all of Virginia, according to Kaine.
In response to audience questions Tuesday, Kaine said he would not support spending money from the state’s general fund on transportation. The general fund’s three main uses are for prisons, healthcare and education, he said.
He also said he would not support passing along secondary road costs for localities to shoulder.
Kaine knows a political battle will be fought over his proposal. He said expected opposition from Republicans in the House of Delegates was a reason, along with already high gasoline prices, that he does not propose higher gas taxes.
His plan took fire last week from anti-tax Republicans controlling the House who suggested the plan was all but dead on arrival. They said they have only to decide how to kill it — “whether we send it into a conference or if we just go home,“ said House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem.
Griffith and Del. M. Kirkland Cox of Colonial Heights, the chief House Republican whip, declared the economy in recession, adding that Kaine’s proposed new taxes — on among other things, motor vehicles and real estate sales — would only slow recovery. “It’s tax, tax and more tax,“ Griffith said.
Perhaps less expected was sniper fire from within his own party. Posts on two closely read Democratic blogs, RaisingKaine.com and NotLarrySabato.typepad.com, were sharply critical of Kaine for relying on the sales tax, describing it as unfair to poor people. The sales-tax increases would not apply to food and medicine.
The fortified House Democratic minority and the party’s new majority in the Virginia Senate welcomed Kaine’s proposal. However, members are not ruling out alternative proposals.
Del. Brian J. Moran of Alexandria, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a candidate for governor, urged a 1-cent, statewide increase in the sales tax. Moran, who opposes higher fuel taxes, made his case in an op-ed article Sunday in The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles J. Colgan, D-Prince William, said he is expecting a measure that would increase the gasoline tax — an idea pushed by Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw of Fairfax County.
Kaine said Tuesday he welcomed suggestions and alternate ideas, the other purpose for his town hall meetings.
Tuesday’s meeting, held in the Hemlock Haven Conference Center adjacent to Hungry Mother State Park, is the southwestern-most of the 10 meetings held between May 13 and June 19.

Jim Nolan and Jeff Shapiro, Media General News Service, contributed.