Governor McDonnell's transportation plan includes eliminating gas tax, increasing state sales tax

 

• Streamlining VDOT Business Operations: Legislation to reduce bureaucratic hurdles and increase efficiency by giving the commissioner and VDOT greater authority over administrative issues, operational issues that principally involve the practice of engineering, and expanding stakeholder outreach and involvement.

 

• Transit Funding Reform: If we are going to invest more funding in Virginia’s transit systems, we must ensure that our transit providers are operating as efficiently as possible. The current transit funding formula – in place since 1986 – is broken. The formula is based on one single factor: operating costs regardless of size, efficiency, or type of transit service provided. In other words, the more you spend, the more you get. Using two-year-old data, a transit providers’ funding is determined based on the proportion its costs bear to the total state transit operating costs. This system does not reward efficiency, and creates winners and losers by rewarding higher cost systems with more funding, while punishing those systems that achieve cost savings. The governor’s plan includes a new performance-based funding formula for transit. The formula will be based 50 percent on system size and 50 percent on performance factors.

 

• Improving the Competitiveness of the Port of Virginia: Finally, the governor’s transportation plan will continue efforts to grow Virginia’s economy and create jobs by implementing further reforms at the Port of Virginia. These reforms will focus on eliminating bureaucratic hurdles to better enable the VPA to compete with private companies in a highly competitive global marketplace. They will also expand the VPA’s ability to act as a catalyst for economic development across the Commonwealth.