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Pols may pay for voters' fee fury

August 19, 2007 12:35 am

BY CHELYEN DAVIS

RICHMOND--The transportation package legislators thought would help them at the November polls might wind up hurting them.

Voter anger over the "abusive-driving" fees is so great that it could hurt incumbents who voted for the fees, political analysts say.

The new fees, intended to raise an estimated $65 million for roads while discouraging bad driving behavior, mean that a DUI costs in the neighborhood of $3,000, and lesser offenses--such as reckless driving, or even failing to use a turn signal, if it causes an accident--could cost drivers several hundred dollars.

While the fees' proponents say they were never intended to apply to things like turn signals, voters are furious.

And they could take out their anger on incumbents--more than 173,000 people signed a petition calling for repeal of the fees and vowing not to support incumbent legislators who voted for them.

"The abusive-driving fees have angered Virginians like few issues in the past 20 years," said University of Mary Washington political analyst Stephen Farnsworth. "I'll be using this law in class this fall as a case study of how not to govern if you want to be re-elected."

The driving fees aren't likely to make much of a difference in races that aren't close, or where there are no incumbents, as in state Senate's 28th District.

But incumbents in tight races who voted for the fees will have some explaining to do.

"I wouldn't expect a huge turnover in Richmond because of this law," Farnsworth said. "But this law absolutely will make it harder for incumbents who voted for it to win in close races, and increases the chances Republicans will lose control of the Virginia Senate."

Lawmakers never expected this level of backlash against the fees.

When Republican lawmakers were negotiating a transportation package during the 2007 session, they thought they were helping their reelection chances. Pass a bill, and Democrats couldn't campaign on a claim that Republicans had done nothing to ease traffic congestion.

Most legislators from both parties wound up voting for the transportation bill, including the fees, although senators from both parties argued against the driving fees, as well as various other aspects of the bill.

But House leaders were adamant that a transportation package could not be paid for with a general tax increase. The compromise therefore cobbled together funding from a variety of new fees and other sources.

Christopher Newport University political analyst Quentin Kidd said lawmakers would have been better off voting for a straight tax increase, because voters see fees as a disingenuous tax anyway.

"[Legislators] have crafted a solution so they can go back home and say, 'I didn't vote to raise taxes.' Voters look at that and say, 'Fee, tax, what's the difference?'" Kidd said. "So it's disingenuous and that's at the root of the frustration. They would have done themselves much better if they'd just voted for something simple like a 3- or 4-cent increase in the gas tax.

"I think the level of frustration wouldn't have been nearly as high as it is, because most of us would not have felt it and most of us would not have thought it was tricky."

Kidd said voters also see the fees, and the entire transportation package, as something put together to fix a political problem rather than a transportation problem.

"[Republicans] came out of last fall's defeat of George Allen and realized, 'We've got to do something about transportation or we're going to get our butts handed to us,'" Kidd said.

An outright tax increase wasn't politically possible for most Republican legislators, many of whom have signed no-tax pledges.

"If they go against that pledge, they risk losing their base," Kidd said.

But now, they've lost some of that base anyway. Several members of conservative anti-tax, small-government activist groups have filed a lawsuit charging that the fees are unconstitutional, and in a news conference this week they blasted the Republican leadership for dreaming up the fees in the first place.

Paul Jost, president of the Virginia Club for Growth--one of the small-government, anti-tax groups that supports conservative Republican candidates--said this week that his organization will not support any incumbent who voted for the driving fees.

That suggests that anger over the fees could hurt Republicans more than it will Democrats, even though members of both parties voted for them, and even though Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine is a proponent of the fees as well.

"Democrats, because they're in the minority, they get a pass on it," Kidd said.

Republicans have the majority in both houses, and thus have the most to lose in November's general election, when all 140 legislative seats are on the ballot.

Even though it was Kaine who amended the bill to exempt out-of-state drivers from the fees--another element that has voters angry, although it would have been impossible to enforce the fees on drivers from other states--the Republican legislators are going to bear the brunt of the anger, Kidd predicted.

"The governor's name's not going to be on the ballot, so it's going to be hard to take this out on him. If I'm looking right now at Election Day, Republicans might wish they hadn't done this, or not done it the way they did it."