Holland Road is not Suffolk's responsibility

That Suffolk is even considering spending $102.5 million on a federal highway is testament to both Washington's failures and Richmond's bullheadedness. Unfortunately, it's also testament to Suffolk's frustration and a dangerous recklessness with the finances of local taxpayers.

A company called CenterPoint wants to build a gigantic warehouse and distribution center on land it owns along U.S. 58 west of downtown. On that overworked stretch of highway - also called Holland Road - traffic even now snarls with a combination of commuters, shoppers and residents.

Adding CenterPoint's trucks would bring Holland Road to a halt. The company knows that, but the prospect of so many jobs - upward of 2,000 - has already swayed state and regional officials to endorse another project from which they would get all the benefits (income taxes, cargo capacity) and none of the problems (traffic, noise).

For Suffolk officials, the calculus is much more complicated and much more practical. The jobs would be welcome, especially in the current economy. But since the work force is regional, many of those workers are likely to come from - and pay property taxes in - other cities.

In any case, those jobs would come at the cost of turning one of the city's primary east/west corridors into a parking lot. Because there is no money available from Richmond and Washington, goes the city's reasoning, Suffolk has no choice but to fix the highway itself.

According to reporting by Pilot writer Dave Forster, the city is now considering - as part of a draft capital improvements plan - issuing bonds to pay for the improvements.

That would tie up a huge proportion of all the city's capital spending, forcing officials to eliminate or postpone or alter other projects. Most essentially, it would levy a bill of $1,300 on every man, woman and child in Suffolk.

Doing so would be a radical shift in highway funding, and a dangerous one, for both Suffolk and the region. It would ask localities to shoulder a punishing financial burden properly the function of the state and federal governments.

Beyond that, a project this big would skew the city's spending priorities in fundamental ways.

Suffolk's draft capital plan, as reported by Pilot writer Hattie Brown Garrow, calls for combining two rural elementary schools - Southwestern and Robertson - despite the fact that the School Board and parents want to keep them where they are. The reason? Money. It's just cheaper to consolidate the schools.

Such a huge highway project would also distort spending on the local roads for which Sufolk is supposed to be responsible.

Absent the CenterPoint project, there is no way that Suffolk would allocate so much so soon to U.S. 58. Even if $102.5 million magically turned up in city coffers, Holland Road would be an unlikely beneficiary, especially when growth has overwhelmed so many of the city's other roads.

Richmond and Washington's abdication on highway funding is the inevitable result of shortsighted lawmaking. Though Suffolk's own legislators have been leaders on transportation funding, their colleagues have been laggards, in part because they receive the benefits of growth in Hampton Roads without spending money to support it or suffering the consequences.

Suffolk will prove that heartless calculus right if the city decides to spend so much of its local property taxes on a project that shouldn't be its responsibility. Worse, the city will give the state's and the nation's leaders permission to continue their own reckless ways, knowing that local taxpayers can be counted on to pay the price.