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Northern Virginia's dire transportation needs clash with difficulties region ...

RICHMOND, Va. — Nowhere in Virginia do drivers forfeit more hours to traffic jams than on the freeways and byways of Washington, D.C.’s teeming suburbs and sprawling exurbs. Commuters stew in gridlocked traffic for hours every day.

So why is it tougher in northern Virginia than anyplace in Virginia to get a transportation project off the drawing boards, much less into service?

Getting consensus on any regional project to alleviate the choked interstate highways, secondary roads and heavily traveled local roads is fraught with conflict among rival localities, the local governments that dictate land use and the state, which bankrolls most nearly all road construction in Virginia.

Then there is the constant conflict between insatiable developers and builders on one hand, and environmentalists and smart-growth advocates on the other. Developers have far too much political money and muscle to lose many of those battles.

The problem worsens by the year as Richmond struggles to comprehend the issues involved.

“You have multiple jurisdictions and you have multiple concepts” about fixing transportation problems, said Sean Connaughton, the former chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors and now Virginia’s secretary of transportation.

“Sometimes it seems like the Tower of Babel, and to make any major fix you have to cross jurisdictional bounds and each jurisdiction has its own culture and its own needs and its own potential solutions,” Connaughton said.

Decades of explosive population growth in northern Virginia turned expressways into parking lots, and statewide and local officials have fretted over it for years.

“You risk killing the goose that lays the golden egg,” said U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner, who has known the aggravation firsthand as an Alexandria resident and whose efforts to address the problem as governor frustrated him even more.

The lucrative jobs of Washington and the corporate office-tower canyons of Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax County are the economic engine of Virginia. Average per-capita income in those localities is slightly more than double the state average, and they account for 36 percent of all the state’s non-farm jobs. And as the state’s population pushed from 7 million to nearly 8 million over the past decade, the bulk settled in northern Virginia, drawn by such growing fields as technology, defense and government contracting and — since Sept. 11, 2001 — homeland security.

FCC report details fall of state, local news but offers wrong solution

Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission issued a report on the state of journalism in the technological age . The year-long study is based on interviews with 600 journalists, scholars and industry leaders. Among its many findings is that newsrooms are no longer equipped to cover local and state governments.

The report blames the shrinking of the newsroom for many of the problems facing journalism. The FCC study showed that newspapers and TV news networks across the nation have halved the staff they had in the 1980s. And those reporters are now forced to produce in “the hamster wheel,” where reporters must rush to tell the news without time or resources to dig deeper. According to the FCC, reporters “have less time to discover the stories lurking in the shadows or to unearth the information that powerful institutions want to conceal.”

One of the recommendations made by the FCC is a state-based version of C-SPAN. This STATE-SPAN would provide wall-to-wall coverage of local government and allow the public to hear the debates and see the votes coming from their state capitols. Although this would increase access, it remains to be seen if the public is interested in this. For STATE-SPAN, who would explain why a state or local legislative action matters? Veteran journalists know that most major decisions are made behind the scenes, long before an issue comes before a council or legislature.

The other big question is who would fund this venture? The cable television industry funds C-SPAN as a public service, but who could step up to provide such access in all fifty states?

Instead of beginning a risky venture like STATE-SPAN or allowing government to intervene in the journalism business, the FCC should look at new journalism initiatives that are covering local and state government effectively. Many of these organizations are nonprofit organizations operating solely online but breaking news in the mainstream media.

Online, nonprofit journalism organizations are filling a void that traditional news media no longer can. Although news organization startups are increasing, many of these nonprofits have been around for decades and are focusing on local stories. Some of the nonprofit journalism organizations serve as watchdogs for government, Wall Street and the media itself.

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