At 1:39 a.m. Thursday, the House and Senate staggered to an end of the Special Session on Transportation. The result: very little. I am deeply saddened by this outcome.

I went to Richmond to solve problems. Over the years, that has meant voting for many bills I did not think were perfect, but that represented the best compromise we could find. Like Reinhold Niebuhr, I understand that “Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.”

So I was pleased when House and Senate Democrats and the Governor created a compromise bill that we could all support. It wasn’t perfect-no bill is. But it offered the opportunity of making real progress. In all, it would have generated approximately $1.92 billion in statewide revenue, $2.28 billion for Northern Virginia, and $1.366 billion for Hampton Roads over the next 7 years.

It would have raised the revenue in a variety of ways – a ¼¢ increase in the sales tax statewide, a full penny here in Northern Virginia, and a few other modest increases. There was no increase in the gas tax in our compromise. It would also have reduced the state sales tax on food.

But on virtually a straight party-line vote, the bill was defeated. Instead, we were offered the opportunity to vote on “innovative solutions” that were not serious efforts to provide the funding we need.

We heard about the need for audits. (I’m for them-and even carried a VDOT audit bill designed to measure the maintenance funding gap.) But ask anyone sitting in traffic on the Beltway whether we need an audit to know there’s a problem. Audits are no excuse for inaction.

We heard about “public-private partnerships.” (That’s legis-speak for “tolls.”) Again, I think PPPs can be part of a solution-but we should not sell off assets that taxpayers have already paid for.

Finally, we heard a proposal that I called the “pixie dust” proposal. We would not raise any taxes. We would just dedicate “future growth” to transportation funding.

Does that sound familiar to you? That was how we were going to pay for the car tax. Instead, we were left with a billion-dollar hole in our budget that it took Mark Warner two years to address. Of course it passed the House, but the Senate took little time to dispose of it.

We all know the truth-if we want something, we have to pay for it. Promising people they can get something for nothing is a way to economic disaster. And economic disaster is what we’ll have if we don’t do anything about transportation.

Pixie dust is not a grown-up funding proposal.