Halfway Through the Session and Little to Show for It
If the 2006 session of the General Assembly was supposed to be the "transportation" session, there's nothing much to show for it, observes Bob Gibson, columnist with the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Says Gibson: "If anyone has seen a big solution running around Richmond, he hasen’t caught it, bottled it and sold it yet."
In marked contrast to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, who heard demands for congestion relief during his transportation listening tour late last year, GOP legislators aren't feeling much pressure to raise taxes, as Gov. Kaine and some state senators have proposed.
The boys and girls of winter, as Richmond scribe Jeff E. Schapiro likes to call state legislators, are not hearing thousands of folks back home saying, Tax us, please, so we can beat this sprawl, y’all."
"We’re not hearing much of anything about transportation" from the home folks, one GOP legislator said.
posted by James A. Bacon @ 8:29 AM
2 comments
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2 Comments:
Did those guys read the stories about the hundreds of people who showed up at Kaines town meetings?
What do we have to do, send them an engraved invitation to do their job? Sure, nobody wants their taxes raised. Sure, we should take advantage of every alternative to reduce the need.
But if we continue to waste billions in productivity sitting in traffic, productivity that might have produced goods and services that would have been taxed, then the need for tax increases will hit sooner and harder, and it will hit a smaller true economy.
I'm sure I don't know the answer, or even if there is one that will work in less than fifty years. In the meantime, NovaMiddleMan gave us at least some insight as to what some young professionals might be thinking - get out of NOVA.
People hear what the want to hear, read what they want to read. So far it is fairly quiet, and I suspect the impact of the town meetings has faded. But this is very early in the game. A week at the General Assembly can be a very, very long time.
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