Our new governor made his first speech to the General Assembly yesterday. His major issue was, of course, the budget deficit that Virginia faces. He promised to make the cuts necessary to balance the budget without raising taxes. To lead this charge, he promised to take a pay cut and his most of his staff take pay cuts and decrease the number of support staff. Once again, he also swore to privatize the ABC stores, asserting the more than $500 million could be raised with the proceeds. He promised to push for off-shore drilling. Amidst all of this, very little was actually mentioned about our transportation problems. Aside from raising the speed limit and reopening rest stops, he made no push for more highway or transit money. To help his campaign promise to create more jobs, he wants to raise the amount of money available for small businesses and lower the threshold for jobs required to be created to qualify for tax credit. He also proposed to drastically increase the amount of money available to state tourism advertising and movie recruiting, citing a new movie called “Secretariat,” about a Virginia race horse. The movie was filmed in Kentucky and West Virginia due to a lack of state promotional money. Finally, he pushed for promotional money for Virginia’s wineries and Virginia’s commercial spaceport at Wallop’s Island.

He seems to be full of ideas. Some of them I agree with (Privatizing ABC) and some of them I think are terrible ideas (off-shore drilling). I only hope that he can muster the political will to fix our transportation system. We need more money to be devoted to transit construction and operation and we need to focus highway money on the construction of rebuilt choke points.

Good Luck Governor. Good Luck GA. Good Luck Virginia. There is definitely a lot to be done.