Beware- POLITICAL POST--

The Obenshain ReportJuly 20, 2009
Rest Area Closures:An Avoidable Blunder

They are among the most literal signs of Virginia's ongoing budget crisis, and if you've pulled off the interstate at a rest area lately, perhaps you've seen one: within the last two weeks, signs went up at eighteen rest areas across the Commonwealth announcing their imminent closure. These rest areas will officially shut down at midnight tonight – just as many motorists and truckers are looking for a place to stop for a break.

Some will see in these newly barricaded entrances a grim commentary on the Commonwealth's openness to tourism, travel, and commerce. Shuttering these rest areas makes those long stretches along our interstates less inviting to those contributing to Virginia's billion dollar tourism industry. As one op-ed columnist observed, a visitor to Virginia might soon tell friends and family that the Blue Ridge Mountains are spectacular, but, on the flip side of the ledger, Virginia closed all the restrooms.

But I have a still more pressing and immediate concern: as many as twenty percent of all highway accidents are caused by "drowsy driving," and eliminating places to pull off, stretch one's legs, or use the restrooms may sometimes be more than inconvenience. It rises, at times, to the level of a safety concern.

Virginia's budget is a mess; there's no getting around that. Cuts are unavoidable, and no department or agency is immune. Eliminating nineteen rest areas – eighteen on July 21 and another in September – to save a mere $9 million is, however, reckless and unnecessary.
As I have long pointed out, the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) and the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB) are no strangers to pork-barrel and wasteful spending. Scrapping plans for a single public rail pilot project, for instance, could fund keeping these nineteen rest areas open for another three years.

Several decades ago, a new term entered the political lexicon: the Washington Monument Strategy. Year after year, Congress would call upon the National Park Service to find ways to operate more efficiently, and invariably the response would be that if they had to cut one more penny, they would have no choice but to close the Washington Monument. Something very similar seems to be taking place here: ordered to make cuts, VDOT has responded by making the most painful and public cuts they can get away with in a game of brinksmanship in which Virginia's motorists are unfortunately cast as mere pawns.

Under federal law drafted in, and more appropriate to, a much earlier era, we do not have the option of commercializing or privatizing our rest areas to make them profitable or at least less fiscally burdensome. Sadly, last week Congressman Frank Wolfe's efforts to change that federal law were rejected with speed seldom seen in the halls of Congress -speed seemingly reserved for "stimulus" bills, bailouts, and possibly now for the nationalization of our healthcare system.
We do, however, have the option of cutting elsewhere. Delegate Todd Gilbert and I have called for an outside performance audit of VDOT which could identify far better targets for elimination.

The barricades are going up tomorrow, but it didn't have to be this way: with a little prudence and an eye toward eliminating needless expenditures, we could have recouped this cost and far more.

Don't let anyone tell you that this was unavoidable: there were always other options. Funds are tight, and painful cuts will continue to be necessary across the board, but the closure of these nineteen rest areas became a foregone conclusion because those who could have charted a different course chose to do nothing.

That's not a legacy I would want.

Mark ObenshainVirginia State Senator

P.S. If you share my commitment to auditing VDOT, please join my Expose VDOT Waste website and Facebook group and, as always, feel free to forward this email to any friends or colleagues who might be interested.

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