Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 22, 1993 TAG: 9307220070
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
James Jennings gets hot when he talks roads.
Maybe that's because his own Scott County, hard by the Tennessee border, has more dirt roads than pavement. And the voters who put him on the Board of Supervisors hope he can change that, somehow.
But Jennings doesn't decide which roads get paved. Nor does he decide if any money will be spent by the Virginia Department of Transportation in his county.
So when the power brokers from Northern Virginia, Richmond and Tidewater decided it was again time to change the formula to fund road building in Virginia - and didn't ask any Western Virginia colleagues to help make the decisions - Jennings suspected what might be next.
"We send our tax money up there to buy their elevators and we get the shaft," the vice chairman of the Scott County supervisors said, a wry smile creeping across his face. "We could ask Tennessee to take us in."
Jennings rose at 4 a.m. Wednesday to make the three-hour drive to Roanoke and appeal to state lawmakers studying the way Virginia pays for roads and decides which ones get built.
Only two committee members - Del. Whitt Clement, D-Danville, and Sen. Kevin Miller, R-Harrisonburg - showed up for the public hearing in Roanoke County, along with state Secretary of Transportation John Milliken. But that didn't deter a parade of Western Virginia legislators from hammering home the same message: Don't forget us.
Western and Southside Virginia, they said, hold some of the state's best potential for growth and economic expansion. Roads make economic development possible, they argued. If calls for formula changes are really calls for raising taxes to improve the entire state's transportation infrastructure - not a portion of the state - say so.
State Sen. Brandon Bell, R-Roanoke County, called highway funding "a reverse Robin Hood formula - taking from the poor and giving to the wealthy."
Sen. Virgil Goode, D-Rocky Mount:
"The last change in the formula in the late '80s hurt us in this part of Virginia. Another change would kill us. There are roads in Floyd County, Carroll County and Patrick County that won't be paved and they'll be in mud forever."
Del. Roscoe Reynolds, D-Martinsville:
"There's not a General Assembly session that goes by that I'm asked to vote on something in Northern Virginia or Tidewater that controls growth. Uncontrolled growth is costing us in Virginia."
House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell, the longtime Vinton delegate and chairman of the House Finance Committee, unleashed a fusillade of challenge, criticism and warning:
"If I live where you live," he said, apparently directing his remarks to Milliken, "there are at least seven or eight ways to get where you want to go, maybe 100. The people who live on the unpaved roads have only one way to get to a commercial center, a medical center or an educational center."
Altering the funding formula in favor of more populated, more congested areas plagued with pollution - as has been proposed - would shortchange "those of us who live in the hinterlands," Cranwell said.
"I'm concerned when I see a study committee tilted away from Southside, Southwest Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley - the poorer parts of the state - and toward what I call `the urban crescent.'
"The formula is not broke. If you think we need more money - if the governor thinks we need more money - say so. Let's don't change the formula and let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I want to work with you and not against you."
by CNB