Is the conference committee taking out ALL of the tax hikes?

I'm not sure how to react to this Richmond Times-Dispatch piece on the plans of the transportation conference committee, at least not entirely. Jim Bacon over at Bacon's Rebellion certainly has his view, and normally I would agree with him wholeheartedly.

However, there is one paragraph at the end of the RTD piece that has my head spinning:

Other signs that the transportation package will largely reflect the House's priorities: Conferees have stripped out a 1.5 cent-per-gallon increase in diesel fuel that would have equalized it with the 17.5 cents-per-gallon tax on gasoline. Also, an optional sales tax to pay for Northern Virginia projects has been replaced with an array of fees.

An array of fees? The House plan as passed did not use "an array of fees" for regional road projects, it used regional tax hikes that were objectionable on several levels. Perhaps the RTD authors (Michael Hardy and Jeff Shapiro) simply weren't paying attention, or perhaps, just perhaps, the regional tax hikes are gone. Hardy and Shapiro were pretty clear about the end of the diesel tax hike, which was also in the original House plan.

In other words, the conferees may have taken every single tax hike out of the plan. If so, and this is just about the largest "if" I have ever encountered, the conferees (almost all of whom are Republicans) may have managed to square the political circle and actually present a transportation plan that doesn't infuriate limited-government voters.

Of course, that depends on what kind of "fees" we're discussing (and whether or not Hardy and Shapiro are correct), but this could be the best news to come out of the transportation soap opera in a good long while.

Cross-posted to the right-wing liberal