VA Dems Promised Good Governance. Weeks After Storm, Roads Tell Different Story

It has been nearly three weeks since a major storm dropped over a foot of snow across Northern Virginia, and residents still cannot safely walk to Metro stations, navigate neighborhood roads, or walk their dogs without stepping over frozen mounds of snow-crete. Drivers fare no better, creeping around blind corners where frozen snow stacks block sightlines, and navigating two-lane roads that narrow without warning to one, the second lane still buried under walls of packed snow. The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has acknowledged that secondary roads and sidewalks remain impassable, with crews resorting to front-end loaders and skid-steers to break through sleet-hardened snowpack that conventional plows cannot handle. For a state that gets winter weather every year, and whose new Democratic trifecta promised voters that the adults were back in charge, the failure is staggering.

The Democratic Party once prided itself on a simple proposition: Government can do good, and public services can actually serve the public. Virginians heard that case just three months ago, when Gov. Abigail Spanberger and her party asked voters for unified control of state government, pledging to deliver results on affordability, infrastructure, and competent management. Most Virginians who are currently climbing over ice ridges to reach their mailboxes can be forgiven for concluding that promise was, at best, aspirational.

Rather than marshaling every available resource to restore basic public services, Richmond has been consumed by an ambitious slate of ideological legislation that has little to do with the daily lives of working Virginians. In the first three weeks of the session alone, the General Assembly has advanced a sweeping assault weapons ban; muscled through more than half a dozen gun control bills on a single day; fast-tracked four constitutional amendments on redistricting, abortion, same-sex marriage, and felon voting rights; and begun work on a cannabis retail licensing regime. Speaker Don Scott and Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell have made clear that their priorities are the agenda items that energize their activist base, rather than the mundane, unglamorous work of keeping roads passable and sidewalks clear. Here’s a suggestion: Pause carving up legislative districts and start carving up ice.

The contrast between legislative ambition and governing competence could not be sharper. Gov. Spanberger declared a state of emergency and thanked Virginians for staying off the roads, but VDOT’s own spokesman conceded that the agency’s standard for success was merely creating an eight-to-10-foot path “suitable for emergency service vehicles.” Now that it has been two weeks since the storm, that standard for success is triage dressed up in a press release, not good governance. When the bar for success is that an ambulance can squeeze through your street, the party of public investment has quietly surrendered the very premise on which it asked for power.

Snow removal in Northern Virginia is admittedly a patchwork of responsibility, with some counties managing their own roads and others falling under VDOT’s jurisdiction. But that complexity is an explanation, not an excuse. Residents in both categories pay state taxes that fund VDOT, and a governor with emergency powers has every tool needed to coordinate across jurisdictions. The fragmented response is itself an indictment because it shows that no one in Richmond has treated this as a problem worth owning.

Virginia is not an isolated case; it is the latest confirmation of a pattern visible wherever Democrats hold unified power. In Minnesota, Democratic governance built a web of welfare programs with minimal oversight that has now produced billions of dollars in fraud. In California, a supermajority legislature presides over a state so rife with corruption that prosecutions stretch from the governor’s own chief of staff to a string of Los Angeles City Council members charged with selling favors and steering contracts into their own pockets. The broad takeaway is unmistakable: When today’s Democratic Party wins full control, it treats government not as a vehicle for universal public services but as a mechanism for redistributing resources to allied interest groups.

Democratic leaders in Richmond have spent the session making the case that government should do more, pushing for more regulation, more programs, and more public investment. That is a legitimate governing philosophy, but it comes with an obligation: You have to prove you can execute the basics first. Public coffers that should fund road maintenance, snow removal, parks, and the basic infrastructure of shared civic life are increasingly stretched thin by expanding entitlement and transfer programs that, whatever their merits, leave less for the unglamorous work of keeping a state running. If state government cannot clear snow from roads and sidewalks two weeks after a storm, why should voters trust it to manage a far more ambitious agenda? They won’t, because the result is a government that is simultaneously more expensive and less functional – a paradox that defines blue-state governance today.

Virginians should demand that their elected leaders govern before they legislate. Gov. Spanberger and the General Assembly have plenty of session days remaining to advance their policy agenda. They do not lack time. What they lack is a sense of obligation to the basic compact between a government and its citizens, the compact that says if you collect our taxes and promise competent management, the walking paths to Metro should not still be impassable over two weeks after a snowstorm.

Voters outside the Commonwealth should take note. When “moderate” Democrats campaign in your state this year promising affordability and good governance, ask them what happened in Virginia, in Minnesota, in California. Ask them why every Democratic trifecta in America seems to produce the same result: ambitious new programs for favored groups and decaying public services for everyone else. Gov. Spanberger ran on affordability and competent governance. Residents of Northern Virginia, still navigating frozen roads and impassable sidewalks, are reconsidering what those words actually meant.