Chichester's warning comes to pass

Sometimes people with perfectly altruistic motives do dumb things.

That's the simplest explanation for the scuffle shaping up in Richmond over $180 million earmarked for road projects.

The debate over those dollars is going to be long and tiresome, and the truth is that folks on both sides of the argument share the blame for creating a budget snarl that could have been avoided.

Two years ago, the state collected more income and sales taxes than it needed to pay for schools, health care and prisons. Outgoing Gov. Mark Warner put aside $340 million for highways. Kaine added another $160 million in his first year in office. State leaders tagged part of the surplus for improvements to the Interstate 64/264 interchange.

Everyone thought it was a great idea, except for Finance Chairman John Chichester, who scolded his colleagues for violating Virginia's long-held policy of bankrolling roads with gas taxes. He warned that any blurring of the budget lines would put transportation in competition with schools for scarce dollars when the economy weakened.

Other legislators shrugged off his lectures as old-fashioned and neurotic. After all, they were only tinkering with surplus dollars, not making permanent changes in the budget. What could go wrong?

Here's what went wrong: Income and sales tax collections slowed to a trickle, making it hard for Gov. Tim Kaine to pay for his pre-kindergarten and mental health programs without cutting other services.

Most of the surplus dollars squirreled away for transportation are still in the bank. Kaine says it will be a couple of years before the permits and bids are finished and the highway construction can begin. So, he wants to use it, rather than leave it idle. In 2010, he's betting that the economy will pick back up and the money can be replaced.

Kaine says this won't slow down the highway projects and he's got a half-ton of charts and graphs to back him up. The prudence of this decision will be a flash point in this winter's budget debate.

Whether he's right or wrong, one thing is certain: If revenues don't improve in 2010, there will be another fracas over whether to spend the money on roads or schools.

Republicans and Democrats alike have spent the past decade trying to tame traffic congestion in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads without raising the gas tax.

The results of those contortions have been the much-reviled abusive driver fees and a chunk of "one-time surplus money" that has turned into a political football that lawmakers will be fumbling over for four years, maybe longer.

Chichester retires this week and won't be around to clean up the mess he warned about three years ago. Virginia needs another statesman to step forward and set the commonwealth back down the path of budget simplicity and honesty.