Highway Robbery

The following is an article I wrote that appears in the Utah Taxpayers Association's October newsletter:

If you read or listened to the news a couple months ago, you would have thought it was Christmas in July.  With reports like "Congress approves $286 billion national highway bill; almost $1.8B for Utah transportation, bill provides $200M for commuter rail," or “Bevy of Utah projects to gain funding in bill,” and “The most federal funding ever committed to Utah in a transportation bill” who could blame you?  The news media listed project after project that was going to be built because of all this money from Washington.   It sounded a lot like “free money” – free for the taking.  The reality?  The money for the transportation bill came from someone, and the someone is you and me.  (We never saw any headline proclaiming: “Utah citizens send more gas taxes back to Washington than ever before.”)

To make matters worse, Utah, like many of the other states in the nation is a “donor” state, meaning for every $1 in gas tax that we send back to D.C. we receive less than $1 in return.  You could think of it like those casino games advertised on the billboard in Nevada guaranteeing “98% loose slots.” In other words, we’re pretty much guaranteed to lose money in the transportation bill.

But it doesn't stop there. Congress then divides the money in categories that it thinks should be funded and adds additional regulation that drives up the costs of projects, but does nothing to improve quality.  The net result?  Federal money is much less effective than state money (some claim 10-20% less effective).

Add to the process the pork barrel spending where Congressmen pick those projects that will curry political favors and popularity with certain powerful constituency, all at the expense of an effective transportation system. The current reauthorization bill has over 6,000 earmarked projects all at the dictate of Congress, overriding the local cities, counties, departments of transportation, and state legislatures. The process fosters a groveling at the Congressional trough for the detriment of America and its transportation system.

In fact, the desire to spend was so great that the recently approved bill not only exceeded the limit the President claimed would bust the budget, but early reports indicate that the spending levels in the newly passed transportation bill will bankrupt the Highway Trust Fund in the 2009-2010 timeframe – meaning Congress will be spending more than is being infused into the trust fund.

Is there a better way?  This past session, the Utah legislature took the opposite approach to transportation funding.  The legislature recognized that the most important objective for transportation funding is to ensure that our limited transportation funds were directed at the most critical needs in the State. So, rather than earmarking a set of new capacity projects, the legislature created the Transportation Investment Fund and is requiring the Transportation Commission to utilize an open, scientific criteria-driven process for ranking project needs to make sure that our limited funds go to our most essential projects, engaging science more and politics less.

Comments

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Thank you for your clear analysis of the pork-laden highway bill. Also, thank you for helping bring some sense to the state's funding of road projects.