Why Pay More Taxes for More Roads?

Who says that procrastination doesn’t pay off? If I had written this yesterday, when I first read about the proposed regional transportation authority, I would have had to write (and you to read) a seriously long piece. Fortunately, this morning, TD columnist Bart Hinkle wrote most of what I was thinking. (http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/opinion/oped.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-01-04-0027.html). Therefore, this will be relatively short.

In case you missed it, my very own delegate, Frank Hall, has proposed that the General Assembly create for us a regional transportation authority. (To be honest, it wasn’t all Frank’s fault. I think the very same chamber of commerce that brought us the Crupi Report is really the source of this proposal). The purpose of the authority would be to fund and implement transportation solutions for the central Virginia region that the General Assembly won’t fund. Projects would be paid for by issuing bonds. The bonds would be paid off by taxing and feeing residents of the region over $100,000,000 per year.

(By waiting until today to write this, I learned where this money is coming from. According to today’s TD, this is the way we will pay: 1- additional yearly $10 registration fee per car; 2- new car registration fee of 1% of vehicle’s value; 3- additional $10 vehicle inspection fee; 4-additional 5% sale on vehicle repairs and service; 5- regional congestion fee of 0.4% on real estate sales; 6- additional 2% sales tax on fuel; and 7- new 2% rental car fee.)

The area to be covered by the proposed authority would include nine jurisdictions, the cities of Richmond, Petersburg, Hopewell and Colonial Heights, and the counties of Chesterfield, Henrico, Hanover, Dinwiddie and Prince George. The authority would consist of the chairs of the boards of supervisors or the mayors of the jurisdictions involved, plus a business representative from each jurisdiction.

As Bart Hinkle pointed out, the transportation authority proposal is flawed because “it calcifies current thinking,” and because “IT IMPEDES progress toward new solutions (his emphasis).” The Hall-chamber of commerce thinking is locked into the idea that if roads are too crowded more roads are needed to fix the problem.

This kind of thinking is exemplified by a statement attributed to Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce (GRCC) President James Dunn in yesterday’s TD. According to the TD,

“He [Dunn] said the area has extensive transportation needs, including widening Interstate 64 east of Richmond, extending the Powhite Parkway and improving Hull Street Road in Chesterfield as well as better regional mass transit.”

I guess I should be happy that Mr. Dunn added mass transit as an afterthought to his “more roads” philosophy. However, when a business leader, who could be a member of the regional authority some day, lists road projects as the area’s greatest transportation needs, it is clear that the business community is "calcified” (thanks Bart for that great word) into outmoded thinking.

What should be obvious to anyone who pays even a little attention to our local growth pattern is that we are stuck in a cycle. It sort of goes like this:
1- We build or improve roads to solve or avoid a real or expected traffic problem;
2- The new or improved road encourages extensive new commercial and residential development;
3- The new development draws tens of thousands of new residents and businesses, which puts an equal number of additional cars on the new or improved road;
4- The result is a new, probably worse, traffic problem; and
5- The solution is—we again must build or improve the roads.

A perfect example of this is the construction of route 288. Route 288 was a road project that went from a nowhere point on Interstate 95 in Chesterfield County to a nowhere point on Interstate 64 in Goochland County crossing a virtually unpopulated stretch of Chesterfield County. Virginia taxpayers paid hundreds of millions of dollars to build this highway. When built, this western bypass of Richmond could hope to carry perhaps a hundred motorists a day routed from points south to Charlottesville. Did we spend hundreds of millions of dollars for these few voyagers? No! Route 288 was built to create development opportunities along every road that intersected its proposed path. The result is ten of thousands of new homes, thousands of new businesses and many thousands of new cars (just think of all that additional carbon dioxide being emitted). And, what a surprise, one of Mr. Dunn’s pet projects in Chesterfield—the improvement of Hull Street Road—is necessary only because route 288 caused such a growth explosion at its interchange with that street.

I am a resident of the City of Richmond. I see no reason why I should agree to increased taxes and fees to pay for improvements to Powhite Parkway, Hull Street Road and Interstate 64. Aside from the rather selfish fact that I rarely drive on those roads, I object to these road improvements because they will add to rather than fix our transportation problems.

Mr. Hall and GRCC: Go back to the drawing board. Come up with a transportation authority that is mandated to design, fund and construct a regional mass transportation system. We don’t need no stinking highways!

Greater Richmond: First Create It, Then Save It

You may not have noticed it, but at the end of November, David Ress of the TD wrote an article entitled “Business leaders eager for input from public.” In the article Mr. Ress indicated that the very same business leaders who paid Dr. James A. Crupi to write his report, “Putting the Future Together,” have decided to implement Dr. Crupi’s recommendation that the business community take the lead in developing a plan for rescuing “Greater Richmond.” I guess this makes sense. If you’re going to lay out big bucks to hire a consultant to recommend that you become “Greater Richmond’s” superhero, you better be ready to don the mask and cape.

At first I was a bit upset. Where did these business leaders get the gall to appoint themselves our saviors? Is there some provision in the Constitution or laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia that says that when you’re not happy with the way things are going you can appoint yourself to fix them? Do we not have in the Commonwealth a General Assembly and a Governor that we elected to make and implement policy? Do we not have in the local jurisdictions boards of supervisors or city councils, not to mention Uncle Doug, that we elected to do exactly what the business community has appointed itself to do? What ever happened to the republic we fought so hard for only 230 or so years ago?

But then I started thinking. Who was I to complain about the business community? Aren’t I, as a maven, self appointed? Oh yes, I studied long and hard and struggled through six decades of life to qualify to be a maven. But I have to admit that nobody elected to me to this position. So, if I can self appoint myself maven, I have to concede that our business leaders can self appoint themselves regional saviors.

Which brings me, finally, to the point of this posting. Is there such a thing as “Greater Richmond?” I have studied my map of the Commonwealth long and hard and cannot find anything called “Greater Richmond.” I see the City of Richmond. I see various counties surrounding the city. But there is no “Greater Richmond.”

How can this be? If there is no “Greater Richmond,” how can there be such a thing as the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce? I went to the chamber’s website to find out about this “Greater Richmond.” On the page “About Us,” under “The Facts,” it says that the chamber is,

“Located in Richmond, Virginia and serving the City of Richmond, and the counties of Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico."

I guess that means that “Greater Richmond” means the city plus Chesterfield, Henrico and Hanover counties. That makes sense to me. The city and the counties do make a nice little compact area, except for Hanover, which is on the wrong side of the Chickahominy. But… in Dr. Crupi’s report he talks as if “Greater Richmond” also included Charles City, Goochland, New Kent, and Powhatan counties. He also sometimes uses the term “Metro Richmond.” Does Metro mean the same thing as Greater?

But, you may say, this is all semantics. I agree. The definition of “Greater” or “Metro” Richmond is not the major issue. In his report, Dr. Crupi sets out as one of the reasons there is little regional cooperation in the Richmond area, “[t]he inability or unwillingness of metro leaders or citizens to think of themselves as a region.” I think that what Dr. Crupi is saying is that there is no feeling of community in the area.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary has the following definitions for “community:”
1- a unified body of individuals;
2- the people with common interests living in an area;
3- an interacting of various kinds of individuals in a common location; or
4- a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.
These definitions use word like unified or common or interacting or together. Unfortunately, none of these words currently apply to the people living in Greater or Metro Richmond.

Rather than being a single community, Greater Richmond is an amalgam of hundreds of small local communities. Aside from those places with historic names like Midlothian, Short Pump, Glen Allen, Bon Air, Mechanicsville, Highland Springs or Varina, there are all those named neighborhoods in Richmond City and the tons of developments built in the suburbs over the years. The unfortunate fact is that the vast majority of the people living in the counties surrounding Richmond do not consider themselves connected to the residents of the city.

Take a ride out Broad Street. Take a ride out Hull Street Road west of route 288. Take a ride out the many other suburban boulevards. What you see is mile after mile of commercial development. Our suburbs have been developed in a way that the residents have all their needs satisfied right near their homes. Need food, go to the local strip mall. Need gasoline, go to the local strip mall. Need medicine, go to the local strip mall. In addition, look at all the jobs that are located out on those suburban boulevards. The fact is that because of the way the suburbs have developed a majority of the people living there have no need to ever enter the City of Richmond. There is no feeling of unity or interdependence or togetherness or connectedness between the residents of the suburbs and the residents of the city.

(An aside: My daughter is a high school teacher in Henrico County. She told me that in one of her classes more that half the students stated they had NEVER been in the City of Richmond.)

Before our business leaders can became saviors of Greater Richmond, they need to create a community. They need to find a way for residents of the city to care about the problems of people living in the suburbs. They need to find a way for residents of the counties to care about the problems of people in the city. On page 28 of his report, Dr. Crupi listed the dismal statistics of poor people living in the city: 19% of the residents of the city live in poverty; 25% of the city’s children live in households with annual incomes of $20,650 or less; 74% of the students in Richmond Public Schools receive subsidized lunches; etc. The business leaders have to get the residents of the counties to care about the poverty in the city. Our business leaders need to find a way to deal with the attitude shown in a letter to the TD back in October:

“Does anyone really believe that suburban citizens will experience any improvement in their lives if such a [regional] government is adopted? Do the surrounding county residents want to see their current quality of life decline to the point that mediocrity and complacency are benchmarks? Should the county citizens be penalized for Richmond's failures?”

Or in this response to TD reporter Michael Paul Williams’ article last week about the inferior quality of school buildings in the city as compared with the counties:

"If the students and teachers can't take care of what they have, what makes it mandatory to give them more. The majority of suburban students, teachers and parents take pride and care in their educations and schools ... Problem is that the people that stay in Richmond don't care about the schools their kids go to."

I am sure there are equally negative attitudes held by city residents toward our suburban cousins.

So, our business saviors, the first thing you must do is convince us all that we live in a community all the time, not just when we suffer from a hurricane or a drying up of our beloved James. You must show us that what happens to one of us happens to all of us. You must convince us that we will sink or swim together.

Entering City, Proceed At Your Own Risk

It is time to award the Maven’s “most wonderful letter of the day.” This time the letter goes to “Keep the City Out of Our Suburbs,” published in the TD on Friday.

This letter has been making me mad since I read it. I have started writing a response several times, but each time I just get too nasty. You know that I am basically a mild-mannered guy and I don’t want to publish anything that will make people feel bad. So, I will not write all the things I wanted to say to the author of that letter. Instead I will write this greeting:

Thank you for the Christo-Judeo-Islamo-Budist love that your letter shows for the unfortunate people who call this decrepit city home. Of course, if we could, we would all run to your suburban paradise. You are always welcome to visit Richmond either for business or pleasure, even though you see no need to pay for that privilege. If you are considering coming to Richmond, however, please heed this warning.

In River City you may come in contact with people who are neither white nor affluent. So, if you’re gonna come here, be sure to wear a surgical mask and bring lots of hand sanitizer. I wouldn’t want you to get contaminated.

Shrinking Cities

In yesterday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, A. Barton Hinkle wrote an OpEd suggesting that Richmond may want to follow the example of Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown, according to Hinkle is accepting the fact that it has a shrinking population. Rather than fighting this trend, the city has decided to downsize its operations and reduce the tax burden of its remaining residents. I replied to Hinkle on his blog (http://barticles.mytimesdispatch.com/). For those who do not read Hinkle’s blog, here is my comment:

I know nothing about Youngstown. I don't know whether it is a shrinking city in the midst of a healthy metropolitan area as it Richmond. I still have the January 26, 2007, TD article "Ready to brag, Richmond?" It dealt with a study by the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce that showed that Metro Richmond compared favorably with the Nashville, TN; Jacksonville, FL; Raleigh, NC; Birmingham, AL; and Charlotte, NC, metropolitan areas.

We don't have a problem in Metro Richmond; we have a problem in the city. The City of Richmond is losing its middle class and its population is dropping. At the same time the populations of Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico counties are increasing.

So why are people leaving Richmond for the suburbs? I think the main reason is schools. There is a widespread perception that the Richmond Public Schools do not do as good a job educating children as do the school systems in the suburbs. In my neighborhood, Westover Hills, we have a perfectly good neighborhood school. However, nobody in my neighborhood sends their children to Westover Hills School. When children reach school age, my neighbors do one of three things: 1-they send their kids to private schools; 2-they home school their kids; or 3-they move to the suburbs. The result is a demographic bubble; there are hardly any families living in the neighborhood with school age children.

If we are going to stem Richmond's hemorrhaging population, we must first drastically improve our public schools. For Richmond to be a great city, it must have great public schools.

Second, we must stress the things that only a central city can do. The Sixth Street Marketplace was a disaster because we were trying to compete with the suburban shopping malls. There was no way we were going to lure suburbanites to shop in the city when they had big malls much closer to where they live. We've got to stress growth in the city that will keep our residents spending their money in the city and luring suburbanites into the city.

Of course, Richmond cannot solve its problems outside of a regional context. Today’s TD shows part of the problem; the fairfaxization of Chesterfield County. The citizens of Virginia spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build route 288, a road that began nowhere, went nowhere, and traveled through a mostly empty county. This road has single-handedly made many parts of Chesterfield County available for development. It has produced the long strip mall on Hull Street Road that continues westward for a considerable distance. Chesterfield County is adding thousands of homes, which will produce thousands of extra cars on our roads and tons of extra carbon in our atmosphere. We need to institute regional planning which discourages, rather than encourages, continued suburban sprawl. We need to stop subsidizing development that is economically and environmentally damaging.

Perhaps, as you suggest downsizing of the City of Richmond may be inevitable. However, I hope we don't decide to bury the patient while it is still breathing and has a decent chance for recovery.