Perdue’s Mobility Fund Unnecessary (The Progressive Pulse Blog)
Posted at 11:48 AM by Stephen Jackson
April 21, 2010
The key part of Governor Perdue’s transportation budget released yesterday is the creation of a ‘Mobility Fund’. This fund is to be used for projects with major logistical priorities for our state, be they road, bridge, port or rail.
Initially the new pot of road money will be funded by taking $22 million of the transfer from the Highway Trust Fund to the General Fund and adding in over $70 million in higher DMV fees, most notably the proceeds from a 25% increase in passenger vehicle and light truck registration fees. Perdue announced she hopes to add an extra $100 million in annual money next year to the fund, and then another $100 million per year in 2012-13.
Grandiose names aside, lets call this fund what it is. Its an ad hoc response to get the I-85 bridge over the Yadkin River built because the hoped-for federal stimulus money never came through. It is policy-making on-the-run and the executive’s creation of it reveals more about the deep problems with road and bridge funding in this state than anything else.
We have a fund to build roads and bridges – its called the Highway Trust Fund – and it is funded through gas and vehicle sales taxes. Revenues are stalling, no doubt. People have been driving less since 2004 as gas prices have risen and the economy has dived. Vehicle sales are currently sluggish.
But have no illusions that this is a problem solely caused by revenues, no matter what rural legislators in our transportation committees consistently say. The primary problem that has prompted the policy drive-by that is the Mobility Fund is we spend our precious Highway Trust Fund dollars according to an ‘equity’ formula that reflects the contours of political power in the late 1980s rather than the transportation needs of today.
The Highway Trust Fund was created in 1989 and was the result of an intense horse-trading carve-up of transportation revenues designed to get the bill passed. Subsequently, money is spread around and spent on legislatively mandated four-lane projects in rural areas like it comes from a bottomless well. That’s fine when times are fat, the roads look OK. But not today.
Despite the multiple objections to the equity formula aired at a recent Transportation Oversight meeting by transportation planners, Mayors, umbrella organizations, interest groups and policy wonks the legislators with the hand on the transportation policy tiller continue to deny the problem. Make the revenue pie bigger and all will be OK, they say.
This instinct flies in the face of what is happening in every other part of state government. As every department and policy area is looking for efficiencies, to reduce redundancies, to get more out of what we have, the transportation crowd refuses to bite the bullet on budget priorities. It all seems too hard.
So it’s business as usual. New name – Mobility Fund – same game. The Trust Fund remains untouched. Never mind that traffic on rural arterial roads actually declined by around 25% between 2004 and 2008. Never mind that we can’t actually look after the investments we have and that one in six bridges are structurally deficient (worse than national average) or that over a quarter of our lane miles on major roads are rated as poor or mediocre (i.e. in need of repair now or very soon). Never mind that interstates are groaning under increased traffic or that congestion in metro areas continues to grow at an alarming rate. Never mind that we continue to woefully underfund bus and rail options.
Add in the fact that the state is also responsible for building small county roads – and maintaining them – and the conclusion is easy. Fix the spending priorities we have before adding any new fund.
As the kicker, by taking DMV fees increases and using them for major logistics construction, the Governor has crowded out the capacity of the state to accelerate the maintenance schedule. DMV fees at present go into the Highway Fund, which is used to patch roads and bridges. Next time you hit a pothole on the way to work, think about that and the Rolls Royce roads with nary a car on them.
