No matter who you are and where you are from, every person that is a citizen of the United States must pay taxes. With that responsibility comes the expectation of tax increases every so often. This is not to say that all tax hikes are justified or useful, because surely there have been tax increases that really have not met their intended purposes. In January of 2002, the North Virginia Alliance Report recommended that the state should "Enact a 1% regional sales or income tax dedicated to specific transportation improvements." Furthermore, they recommended that the state should "Enact legislation requiring the referendum ballot to list projects to which funds will be dedicated, but postpone project selection until after the session when adequate performance-based analysis can be performed." Both of these recommendations were very serious, and could potentially have been very costly to the residents of north Virginia. The proposal formally was changed to increase the retail sales tax by one-half of one percent from 4.5% to 5%, an 11% increase, in Northern Virginia four counties and five cities: Loudoun County, Fairfax County, Arlington County, Prince William County, and the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax, Falls Church, Manassas and Manassas Park. It also proposed a tax increase by one percent from 4.5% to 5.5%, a 22% increase, in the Hampton Roads are. If the referendum had been passed, it would have become effective July 1 of this past year. .
The issue really first came about in 1997 when the Commission of Future Transportation in Virginia estimated that the Commonwealth's 20-year funding shortfall would be about $40 billion. Two years later, the Northern Virginia Transportation Coordinating Committee (TCC) produced a Northern Virginia 2020 Plan with an estimated cost of $30 billion. Of that, $15 billion, or roughly $750 million annually, was unfunded (Ferrara). In 2001 Mark Gardner, who is presently governor, was campaigning for the governorship of Virginia and announced that he wanted residents of Northern Virginia to vote on a sales tax referendum that would increase transportation funding.
