Vermont View: Last stop for funding is your town
Toolbox
By Sue Minter - Published: September 7, 2008
I have been thinking about Minnesota this week, but not because of the Republican National Convention. My thoughts are on the bridge collapse in Minnesota that occurred just a year ago. That disaster, which killed 13 people and injured more than 145, should have been a warning to us all about the danger of neglecting our transportation infrastructure. Sadly, we don't seem to have taken the warning too seriously.
Last week, the governor presented a plan to cut $8 million in Vermont's transportation projects, including $2 million that was supposed to go to fund town bridge and road projects. Cutting repairs to bridges and roads is shortsighted. It will cost taxpayers dearly to defer repairs to the future, because construction costs are rising by about 20 percent annually. The cruelest effect of these cuts is that they may lead to increases in property taxes.
Town governments have already been hard hit. Severe storms have pummeled Vermont this summer, hammering local roads and busting town budgets, and now the state is reducing the funds available to towns for fixing their roads.
While the administration steadfastly opposes raising transportation revenues, cuts to local transportation projects will lead to increases in property taxes — the only revenue source available to most towns to fix their roads. Shifting costs to towns, and adding pressure to the over-burdened municipal property tax, is not a long-term solution to our transportation challenge. It simply passes the buck to the last stop – your town.
The current revenue reductions in the transportation fund were to be expected. The House Transportation Committee on which I serve has been presented with data predicting a widening gap between our revenues and our transportation needs for each of the past four years. It is unfortunate that the state now finds itself woefully unprepared for the revenue decline. It is particularly disappointing knowing that every proposal that our committee advanced to create new revenues to proactively address the shortfall, failed to gain support. And so we now find ourselves in a downward spiral of neglect, getting further behind in fixing our roads and bridges, even as the costs spike and the revenues continue to plummet.
In an effort to bring more attention to infrastructure challenges, our transportation committee last year traveled around the state to hear from Vermont communities about their bridge and road troubles and see the crisis firsthand. We learned that more than one-third of Vermont's 2,700 bridges are deemed by federal standards to be either "structurally deficient" or "functionally obsolete" or both. We heard story after story of bridge lane closures, weight limits, deepening potholes and road washouts. All of these added significant financial burdens to local towns and businesses. And the costs to fix the problems are skyrocketing.
Ironically, high fuel prices have reduced our transportation revenues. The fuel tax provides a major source of funds for road and bridge repairs. But the fuel tax is a per-gallon (unit) tax; revenues do not increase when the price of gas increases. In fact with people driving less, or driving more fuel efficient vehicles, drivers are using less gas, so revenues collected for the transportation fund are rapidly declining. This means less money for our needed road and bridge repair, as well as for public transit, rail, sidewalks, park and rides and bike paths. And it means we are continuing to tread water in terms of our investments into fixing our problem, even as the current is getting stronger. Costs are escalating dramatically, so each year we delay projects, the problems deepen and it costs taxpayers far more in the future.
Vermont is not alone. In spite of calls in Congress and state legislatures across the country to fix our bridges in the wake of the Minnesota bridge collapse, very little has been accomplished. Sixty-four percent of the nation's structurally deficient bridges received no work beyond regular maintenance in the past year. In Vermont, our record is even worse. The Vermont Department of Transportation had plans this year to fix only 54 (12 percent) of Vermont's 438 structurally deficient bridges.
The Vermont Legislature made some progress in May when, at the end of the legislative session, the Douglas administration reversed its position and supported calls by the Legislature for increased bonding for transportation. An additional $10 million in bonded road and bridge repair was approved as part of the state economic stimulus package. Unfortunately, however, the $ 8 million cut in transportation currently proposed, erases this progress.
We need to face the economic reality of aging infrastructure and declining revenues and consider new ways of generating funds for transportation. I believe every option for transportation revenues should be on the table, including those used by our neighboring states such as: tolling, personal property tax for cars, pay-as-you-go fuel fees, fuel sales taxes that adjust with inflation, new truck fees, use of the rainy day fund, and additional bonding.
We need to address our challenges and plan for a future where we fix the problems, instead of our current approach which is forcing us to fall farther behind. In this era of globalization, our economic recovery and success depends on a modern infrastructure – where people can get to work and our goods can get to market.
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