We all should

We all should

pay for roads

By GEORGE W. WILBUR

When the Virginia General Assembly convenes for a special transportation session Sept. 15, one of the biggest brouhahas is likely to be over whether to ax the venerable tradition of making highway users alone pay for more and better roads.

One of the proposals of Gov. Gerald Baliles’ special transportation commission to help finance a 10-year, $10 billion road building program is to increase from 3 percent to 4 percent the state’s general sales tax. Because Virginia’s localities also impose a 1 percent sales tax, the effect would be to raise the overall tax to 5 percent.

Of the additional $400 million to be raised annually, the commission suggested $300 million go to the road program and the remainder to the general fund.

Sharply disagreeing with the proposal was former Gov. Mills E. Godwin Jr., a commission member who fathered the sales tax during his first administration in the late 1960s. He said the sales tax was enacted to underwrite public education, not to build roads.

The idea of special funds for special purposes gained popularity during the administration of then Gov. Harry F. Byrd Sr. some six decades ago. If Virginians were going to pay a lot of money to get Henry Ford’s A-models out of the mud and onto blacktop, the theory went, those who used the new roads should pay for them.

But, with motor traffic still in the teething stage, few people in the 1920s envisioned the pervasive role highways would play in people’s lives more than a half-century later.

The plain fact is, every Virginian is a highway user. If there is such a thing as a lifelong recluse who never clambered aboard a car or truck — and I doubt such an oddity exists —the chances are overwhelming that the clothes on his back, the food in his larder and the materials for his abode, however humber, traveled by road to the stores where they were sold.

Without an expansive highway network, Virginia’s $1 billion-ayear tourist industry would evaporate, schools would go unattended, crops would rot in the fields, the sick would be denied medical assistance, industries would stagnate, church pews would remain empty and recreational outlets would disappear.

There may be valid reasons for continued segregation of state funds for special purposes. Doubtless they will be amply aired at the special legislative session.

But to use a 1920s argument to try to thwart a proposal designed to address Virginia’s highway needs going into the 21st century is specious at best. Certainly, those who use the roads should pay for them. And that means every last one of us, plus a lot of transients and tourists as well.