HoodaThunk?

A story in the print edition of the Loudoun Independent reminds me that there’s going to be another referendum on the ballot this year and this one’s about roads. Having become tired of waiting for Virginia’s General Assembly to get off their collective rear-ends and provide some fixes for our road and traffic situation up here, the Board of Supervisors has decided to ask the county residents if they can take out loans (in the form of issuing bonds) to start building the roads themselves. I spoke about this back in July and the latest article does us all the favor of reminding us what’s coming.

In the time since the issue first came to my attention, I’ve not heard anything else on the topic in the public debate. (Plenty on the Dulles South CPAM, but nothing on this.) While I am also tired of the General Assembly’s inability to actually get something done, my mind hasn’t changed on the issue since I wrote about it. I do not see requiring Loudoun residents to pay for roads while still paying state taxes – a portion of that for roads, I might add – as a valid approach. Now, if someone were going to tell me that my state taxes would be reduced so I didn’t have to pay into the state for roads they should be building but aren’t then that would be a different matter.

Of course, they’d also need to tell me that the referendum has something in it that would keep the funds collected from being diverted to other uses. I’ve looked at the referendums that will appear on the ballot and there’s no such language there. I’m skeptical of issues written like this.

So, unless something changes dramatically in the next 10 days, I won’t be voting in favor of either one of the road issues on the ballot. Richmond needs to spend some of that $4 billion surplus on the stuff they supposedly collected it for, not make the local residents pay for their improvements again.