Schapiro: Baliles’ plan a road map for Deeds

The Democratic candidate for governor is pummeled by Republicans for playing coy on new taxes for roads. The Democrat squirms; somehow, still manages to win and promptly calls a special session of the legislature to, you guessed it, raise taxes.

A scenario for 2009?

Maybe.

This is how events unfolded 24 years ago in the run-up to the last big, tax-fattened investment in transportation under Jerry Baliles, a governor invoked by the frenetic fellow Democrat who mimics him without saying so: Creigh Deeds.

Long before Mark Warner, who raised taxes in 2004 after promising he wouldn't, Baliles was depicted by yapping out-of-power Republicans as the poster boy for bait-and-switch politics.

Having said only once, and somewhat sotto voce, that he wouldn't seek a tax increase, Baliles sought -- and won -- four of them, nine months after taking office. They weren't as big as he preferred. But the lesson for 2009 is how Baliles forged a consensus on additional taxes in advance of calling back the General Assembly.

Deeds, beyond his transparently murky dodge on new taxes, speaks only of a special session on transportation in 2010, the first year of the next governor's term.

Implicit is that the mechanism for reaching common ground is, as Baliles favored, a bipartisan commission whose members would include business leaders, former governors, legislative grandees and experts.

The Baliles-era version, coupled with an aggressive public-relations campaign that focused on transit needs specific to this region and that, included a panel within the panel where the heaviest lifting was done.

That committee, dominated by tax-raising ex-governors from both parties and guided by a Main Street lawyer who would later recruit citizen Baliles as a partner, didn't give Baliles everything he wanted.

For example, reflecting the then-still-strong pay-as-you-go approach to roadbuilding that had been a cornerstone of Virginia's fabled fiscal conservatism, the committee balked at liberal use of bond financing.

Even the tax increases, all eventually adopted, weren't quite what Baliles sought. He wanted to add a penny to the sales tax, then 4 percent, but had to settle for a half-cent. The gasoline tax was pushed to the current level. Even a future anti-tax hawk, a Republican delegate named George Allen, voted for that. There also were rises in licensing and motor-vehicle titling taxes.

Focusing on more than money, the commission recommended an overhaul of the road-and-rail bureaucracy.

The current template emerged: a vast agency, renamed the Virginia Department of Transportation to reflect its broad mission. Governance changed, too, with VDOT's chief sitting as a member of the board that oversees the agency. That was supposed to flatten management; streamline decision-making.

Baliles was helped by the times. The economy was strong; Republicans were divided. Now the opposite is true. That might cost Deeds the governor's office.

Pledging no new taxes, Bob McDonnell proposes paying for roads, in part, by selling off state liquor stores.

But the approach that freed Baliles to not keep his word -- yet jump-start transportation -- could help McDonnell break a promise that the unspoken doubts of Republicans suggest he may not be able to keep.

Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 6496814 or . Watch his video column Thursdays on TimesDispatch.com. Listen to his analysis Fridays at 8:33 a.m. on WCVE (88.9 FM).