Thirty Years of Traffic

It’s been a slow blogging week, but last night, at our LCDC executive committee meeting, we discussed a posting on the LCRC website about our 10th District Congressman, Frank Wolf.  In the posting, it says that Rep. Wolf “has been working to improve transportation for nearly 30 years”.  Now, I will agree with my friends on the LCRC; he has been working on that, as have all of our Northern Virginia members of Congress. But it’s been 30 years – is transportation any better now than it was 30 years ago? He’s going to stake his claim on that?It was a little over two years ago that the Dulles rail project (aka, Metro to Dulles) was almost scuttled due to Rep. Wolf’s ineptitude. Back in late 2008, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters announced that unless there were changes made to the rail plan, the project would be disqualified from receiving $900 million in federal grants. Without that grant, rail to Dulles would be dead.

How was Rep. Wolf responsible for that, you say? Rep. Wolf was in the majority on the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee for Transportation and HUD (that’s a mouthful).  That subcommittee has jurisdiction over the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the agency that runs Metro. One would like to believe that a congressman who sits in the majority on a subcommittee that approves the budget of the Department of Transportation would be a little more in tune with how the department was doling out its’ funds, and whether or not that agency was questioning the viability of a major transportation project in his congressional district. A project on which he stakes his reputation, nonetheless.

But Virginia officials were blind-sided with that ruling, and Rep. Wolf pleaded with Governor Kaine to help with securing those federal funds.  Which Governor Kaine did, keeping the project on track.  And for which (President Bush’s) Transportation Secretary Peters praised him:

Governor Tim Kaine deserves much credit for his overwhelming commitment to this proposal and for spearheading the changes necessary to move it forward.

In short, with almost 30 years of congressional service, and with 16 of those years being in the Republican majority on the Transportation Appropriations subcommittee (8 of those years under a Republican President), and also serving from 1995-2000 as Chair of that subcommittee, Frank Wolf hasn’t made transportation in the region any better for us. In fact, it took action by a Democratic Governor to save Wolf from the embarrassment of losing $900 million in federal funding for Dulles rail.

We can do better. It’s time to do better.  Jeff Barnett can do better.  

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