Published: March 09, 2008 10:44 pm         

Transportation act receives OK

CHARLESTON — For eight long, frustrating years, Delegate Richard Browning peddled the concept of forging a public-private relationship to lay more asphalt in West Virginia.

Finally, just before midnight Saturday, his persistence crossed the goal line in one of the Legislature’s longest-running overtime contests on a single idea.

Browning convinced enough of his colleagues on both sides of the well to pass the Public-Private Transportation Act, but not before the ever-cautious Senate insisted on inserting some controls in two branches of government.

“I see what other states are doing as far as financing road projects,” Browning, D-Wyoming, reflected Sunday.

“I see investments in states like Virginia, Texas, South Carolina. And I hear our highways department bemoan the fact that they don’t have any money. I’ve been working for years trying to get them to give us some ideas on how to get extra dollars. This is one way.”

Senate Majority Leader Truman Chafin, D-Mingo, led the Senate into making sure the Legislature exerts controls over any road project by tying them to joint resolutions. If both houses don’t sign on, any such road project is dead in the water.

Moreover, anything given a green light by the Legislature faces another hurdle — the governor’s approval.

Even so, not every senator was sold on the idea that could lead to mushrooming toll roads in pockets where folks have been riding free ever since Detroit began sending the horseless carriage off its assembly lines.

Sen. John Yoder, R-Jefferson, who is leaving to run for a judgeship, warned his colleagues that toll roads could prompt a backlash that might lead to a second defeat of a local table games option election.

Voters in his home county became the only one of four counties with horse and dog tracks to spurn casino gambling, after the Legislature last year approved the voting. Jefferson residents were irked by the funding formula in which gambling proceeds would be returned to the counties.

“By voting for this bill, you’re most likely causing the state to lose table game revenue the next around of $50 million to $100 million,” Yoder cautioned.

The senator warned that the idea of installing tolls on future roads in the Eastern Panhandle would trigger a revolt.

“I’m not against the King Coal Highway,” he said, outlining his opposition to toll roads in his district. “I’m all for it. It’s a mistake to shove it down the people who do not want it and outrage them to the place where they’re going to be coming out in arms and vote against table games.”

If Maryland approves table games, he said, patrons aren’t likely to venture into West Virginia if they are forced to shell out $4 to drive over a road.

Besides, he said, the proceeds would wind up in the pockets of multi-state corporations based outside West Virginia.

Yoder likened his opposition to that of Gen. George Custer at Little Big Horn, quipping, “I’ll try to smile as you scalp me.”

Yoder smiled and the Senate did just that, overwhelmingly approving the amendment after Truman outlined it.

Sen. Clark Barnes, R-Randolph, was all right with three parts of the amendment, but balked at the fourth provision that he dubbed as “double taxation” for commercial haulers.

By that, he explained, truckers not only would be paying a toll but forced to be taxed for fuel while driving through West Virginia by losing a credit in filing their monthly reports.

Residents in the panhandle counties are “very wary” of the public-private concept, Barnes said.

“They don’t want to be driving on a toll road back and forth to work like folks in the southern part of the state,” he said.

And therein lies the rub, Browning suggested.

“I’m not adverse to putting tolls in other parts of the state to come with money to help build the roads that we helped build all over the state,” he said.

Southern residents have long felt the rub of not only paying West Virginia Turnpike tolls but pouring buckets of dollars into the state’s coffers in severance taxes that improved life hundreds of miles away in other counties.

Browning said his selling job was complicated in the Bob Wise administration when the highways commissioner, Fred Van Kirk, “never liked this concept.”

“The harder I tried to get it passed, the harder he worked to keep it not passed,” he said.

“But the leadership of the House changed and that helped somewhat. Labor got involved at the end. I had to work on that. I’m real pleased that it passed.”