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By CHELYEN DAVIS
RICHMOND--Smart-growth advocates rallied here yesterday, urging lawmakers to support bills that would give localities more ability to manage development.
About 200 people, including a handful from the Fredericksburg area, came to the state capital to lobby for legislation that would expand localities' abilities to make developers pay proffers, tie local land-use planning and state transportation planning more closely together, and give localities more control over the roads and developments built within their boundaries.
"We have to plan better to reduce traffic," said Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, which helped plan the rally.
Many of the bills in question are being pushed by Gov. Tim Kaine, whose campaign last year made growth issues a focus. But legislators have also taken up the matter--Republicans have their own bills, and in some cases Republicans are carrying Kaine's bills.
Several of those Republicans were at yesterday's rally.
"Paying for development is not a Democrat issue, and it's not a Republican issue," said Del. Bob Marshall, R-Prince William. "It is an economic justice issue, and it's about time Virginians got some justice on this. Developers have to pay for the cost of development, and stop shoving this off on citizens."
Kaine told the crowd that growth is a truly nonpartisan issue.
People sitting in congested traffic are "not checking their party registration to see if they're frustrated," he said. "We feel a great deal of momentum this year because of this bipartisan issue. It's a year for action."
Kaine told the slow-growth supporters that his main message to legislators is that they need to do something this year--that they don't want to go home from the session empty-handed.
Kaine, who after his election held a number of town-hall meetings around the state on the issues of transportation and growth, said he's having another series of those starting next week to continue raising support for legislation intended to manage growth and ease traffic congestion.
"This is not the work of one legislative session," Kaine said. "This will not be the be-all, end-all of what we do. But I hope this session can be a watershed."
At the new meetings, Kaine said he expects to lay out not only his own transportation proposal, but those of the Senate and the House.
"As I lay out to the audiences in the town halls what's on the table, I'll probably give some side-by-side comparison of the three different plans with the belief that the plan at the end of the day is going to be some mix-and-match, probably, out of all three," Kaine told reporters. "The end result will not be 100 percent what any of us want but I am very optimistic that we will get to an end result that will be the right thing. How we get there I'm very willing to adjust to. There is no dollar figure that says this is a success or this is a failure because the answer isn't about dollars, it's about solutions."
The House Finance Committee this week killed Kaine's proposals to raise several fees to pay for transportation improvements; the Senate Finance Committee is expected to hear the revenue proposals of the Senate plan today. The Senate plan, unlike Kaine's, includes a sales tax on gasoline.
Kaine still feels strongly that the state needs a dedicated funding source to use for transportation.
"We need revenue for the 21st century," he said. "We need to find transportation revenue to solve our transportation problems."
But Kaine said at the rally that the state can't just "tax and pave" its way out of the transportation problem. He's not opposed to Republican efforts to focus on greater accountability at the Virginia Department of Transportation, to ensure that money spent on transportation is spent wisely.
Several area smart-growth proponents came to the rally yesterday, including Stafford County Supervisor Pete Fields and former Supervisor Kandy Hillard.
Local resident Doris Whitfield said all the talk about bipartisan support for growth reforms is encouraging.
"Folks are getting sick of things getting lost in committee," agreed Stafford resident Linda Muller. "We want action."
To reach CHELYEN DAVIS:
Email: cdavis@freelancestar.com
