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Chichester |
RICHMOND--Deepening rifts over the Republican leadership's transportation compromise will come to a head in the next few days, as House members vote on the original deal and some Senate members prepare an alternative plan that likely includes a gas tax.
The House Appropriations Committee is expected to vote today to approve the transportation compromise that originated with a handful of House and Senate Republican leaders.
A Senate subcommittee is taking up that legislation today, as well.
But other senators, who dislike the Republican compromise plan's reliance on general fund money and borrowing, are crafting an alternative, which--if it comes to fruition--may appear in the Senate Finance Committee tomorrow.
Sen. John Chichester, R-Northumberland, heads that committee but was noncommittal about reports that the alternative plan includes a gas tax.
"I don't know what we'll do," he said yesterday. "But nothing is better than [the compromise plan]."
Other sources, however, said members of Chichester's committee are working on a transportation proposal that would include some debt, but would also apply the state sales tax to gasoline.
Virginia has a 17-cents-per-gallon flat tax on gasoline, but proponents of a sales tax say it would then rise with inflation and gas prices. They also say a gas tax would ensure that people who drive on Virginia's roads--particularly those from out of state --would help pay for the roads.
Taxes are anathema to many House Republicans, however, and a Senate-proposed gas tax has no guarantee of passage in the House.
"Are they trying to torpedo the whole thing?" asked Del. Vince Callahan, R-McLean, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and an architect of the House-Senate compromise plan.
Callahan said he wants senators to give a chance to the compromise plan, which took months to reach, rather than shooting it down.
He said he himself might support a gas tax, but his colleagues won't.
"I don't think a gas tax is ever going to get out of the House," Callahan said.
But Chichester, while noting that any Senate alternative plan could include any number of things and a gas tax was just one of many options, said senators should not let fear of the House prevent them from proposing solutions.
"I can't judge what's going to happen to it in the House," Chichester said. "That's not what it's about."
What it is about, Chichester said, is the feeling among many of his Senate colleagues that the compromise plan is "a hollow overture.
"The package that has been advanced is so onerous," he said, that other senators have asked him "if some alternative can be put together that's fairer, something that's realistic, not something that's carved out of desperation. I would not like it to be said that the Senate passed legislation as hollow as what has been offered to us."
Sen. Emmett Hanger, R-Augusta, a Finance Committee member, said while the gas tax proposal "has some support," he knows it's unacceptable to the House and thinks it should not be part of the debate at this point.
"We still need to focus on where we can agree, so that's off the table in my opinion," he said.
Instead, Hanger said, lawmakers should have a "conversation with the voters"--i.e., during this fall's elections--about supporting a gas tax.
The compromise plan has been sent to the Senate Transportation Committee, not Chichester's Finance Committee, although Chichester said it will have to go through Finance at some point.
Lawmakers will have to scramble to make that happen; these bills must be out of committees by tomorrow, in time to be voted on in each full house by Tuesday, which is the deadline for each house to deal with its own bills.
Chelyen Davis: 804/782-