Final week: General Assembly
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Ken Cuccinelli, II
Published: March 4, 2008
The big news for this week was the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling that the funding authority for last year’s transportation package is unconstitutional. I believe now, as I did when the bill became law, that the court made the right decision here.
When I voted for the transportation package in February 2007, it was structured to allow the people’s elected representatives at the local level — members of the Boards of Supervisors — to vote on whether to raise taxes to fund transportation improvements for our region. As you may recall, the governor amended the bill in April 2007 to give that taxing power to the unelected members of the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA). This was bad policy and unconstitutional and I voted against the governor’s proposed changes to the bill; however, the governor’s amendments passed despite my ‘no’ vote. Giving the NVTA taxing authority was not constitutional and the Virginia Supreme Court rejected that part of the bill based on the time-honored Constitutional principle that Virginians should only be taxed by people that they elect directly.
The court’s decision essentially puts us back where we started last year when it comes to addressing our region’s transportation problems. Given that we are in the last week of the session, addressing this critical issue during the remainder of the session would be very difficult to do. Thus, the governor has indicated that he will probably call a special session of the General Assembly to address transportation, something that I certainly support.
Even so, re-addressing transportation in this tight budget year will be challenging. In the Senate, the majority have already shown their willingness to remove general fund monies that we allocated for transportation last year. They were quick to say that your taxes must be raised. I still believe that we should re-prioritize our budget to actually make transportation funding the priority we say that it is, but efforts to get legislators across the state to agree on that priority have not proven successful in the past. I am already considering alternatives for funding congestion relief in a special session and I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on these options.
In other revelations this week, it seems we in Virginia government have a riddle: “When is a lockbox not a lockbox.” Answer, when we ignore the Constitution. As a legislator, I’ve advocated putting a constitutional “lockbox” on the transportation trust fund.
My constitutional amendment would have ensured that monies allocated for transportation are actually spent on transportation — instead of being “borrowed” or simply moved to other budget categories on a legislative whim. This is sound policy and only makes sense when we need to plan for large future transportation expenditures. Such planning is difficult for VDOT when the money they have to work with is used in a game of political hide and seek.
This week, attorneys for the Division of Legislative Services made an interesting discovery. One “lockbox” we do have seems to have been left wide open — in violation of our Constitution. At the top of the Web site for the Virginia lottery, we find this statement: “Revenue from the Virginia Lottery goes to public education in the Commonwealth.” In fact, several years ago the people of Virginia approved a Constitutional requirement that the money from the lottery go directly to fund education. But it seems that a separate fund for lottery proceeds was never actually created. Lottery proceeds have instead been co-mingled with General Fund monies and then passed on to local governments for education as well as being used for many other non-education uses. That process for handling lottery money violates the Constitution. It’s something of a shell game, and we need to fix it immediately. The current situation, however unintentional, violates the public trust and undermines confidence in our democratic process. We should start following the dictates of the Constitution regarding how lottery proceeds are to be distributed immediately. We will see if my colleagues feel as strongly about this issue as I do.
Again, this action will be necessary to take during the same week when we are trying to iron out a final two-year budget for the Commonwealth.
So, as we role into our final week of the General Assembly session, we have plenty to think about — on top of already intense budget negotiations. As always, I’d appreciate hearing from you. Please contact me at or fill out my legislative survey at .
Ken Cuccinelli, II, is a Virginia State Senator representing District 37.
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