EDITORIAL: Lawmakers yanked Helen’s Law funding - Fredericksburg.com

IT’S NO secret that one of the main reasons traffic is so bad in Fredericksburg is that the dispensers of transportation dollars in Richmond ignored this region for decades. It literally took the congested stretch of Interstate 95 between U.S. 17 in Stafford County and D.C. to be declared the “worst traffic hotspot in the nation” in 2017 to jolt the commonwealth into doing something about it.

The proliferation of construction cranes and orange cones, as well as last Wednesday’s opening of the first phase of the Southbound Rappahannock River Crossing, are signs that the region is finally getting some respect.

Or is it? A troubling move by the General Assembly last summer that yanked funding being used to implement Helen’s Law says otherwise.

On June 8, 2020, Stafford Board of Supervisors Chairman Meg Bohmke sent a letter to state Sen. Richard Stuart, R-Stafford, asking him to propose an amendment to the Virginia Code “regarding the distribution of state recordation tax revenues” to more than 100 cities and counties in the commonwealth.

Virginia levies a recordation tax—25 cents for every $100 of real estate valuation—whenever property in the commonwealth is sold. Since 1993, the money has been collected and sent to Richmond, and then returned to localities that collected it to fund their local transportation projects.

source: https://fredericksburg.com/opinion/editorial-lawmakers-yanked-helen-s-law-funding/article_92bf4979-8779-5fa3-955c-6d52887ca5ef.html

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