By Steve Brawner
I talked to an engineer the other day whose specialty is repairing municipal water and sewage lines. He told me that, because the pipes are underground and out of sight, cities tend to wait until the problem requires prompt attention before calling, which is understandable. It’s the same reason that homeowners don’t think about their own sewage systems because, every time they flush, it goes away. Until it doesn’t.
Arkansas has a similar problem: $19 billion worth of identified highway needs and only $4 billion of identified funding. These are important, pressing issues, but not emergencies. Problems will remain hidden for a long time and then surface only gradually. We can and will avoid potholes and ignore cracks in bridges, until we can’t.
What would $19 billion buy us? Some items on the Highway Department’s wish list would be nice to have and some we gotta have. It would like four-lane highways to connect every currently unconnected town of 5,000 to an interstate. That would be nice to have.
It wants to raise the state’s share to construct Interstate 69 through southern Arkansas and Interstate 49 down the state’s western edge. Arkansas needs to have those. But the rest is basic maintenance of existing roadways and construction of needed new infrastructure. These we gotta have.
The hard part is not distinguishing between “nice to have” and “gotta have.” The hard part is paying for all of this. The way the state and nation fund highways is based on a simple and fair premise: Those who use the roads should pay to build and maintain them. That means fuel taxes paid at the pump fund most highway construction and maintenance.
The problem is that, driven by rising oil prices, Americans are using less gas by driving less miles and by using more fuel-efficient vehicles, such as hybrids. Now the first all-electric cars are hitting the roads. At first, this will mean that the few who can afford these expensive cars will be driving on roads the rest of us are paying for. But then, in the not-too-distant future, a lot of us will drive electric cars.
Meanwhile, the cost of constructing and maintaining highways is skyrocketing, in part because they are constructed of an increasingly expensive material — asphalt, a petroleum product.
So rising oil prices are depressing the highway system’s revenue stream at the same time they are increasing the costs of maintaining that system. That means more money will have to come from somewhere.
Aside from the amount of highway funding, there is the somewhat inefficient way Arkansas distributes its transportation funds — to a vast and relatively untraveled rural road network, all supervised by five well-meaning highway commissioners who are constitutionally unaccountable and who answer to no one. Far too much transportation money is spent on “needs” other than roadways. But that’s a subject for another column.
In the last session, the Legislature appointed the Arkansas Blue Ribbon Committee on Highway Finance, a study group led by Sen. John Paul Capps of Searcy, to try to get ahead of this funding shortfall. The commission will present its recommendations to a Legislature that will have no desire to ask Arkansans to pay higher taxes for anything, not even better highways.
Political and economic realities will mean the state and its drivers will keep ignoring those potholes and cracks a while longer. Until we can’t.
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Steve Brawner is a freelance journalist, a former newspaper editor, and a former aide to former Gov. Mike Huckabee and Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller. His e-mail address is brawnersteve@mac.com.
