Supporting Ports-to-Plains at the Local Level

Ports-to-Plains Newsletter

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September 30, 2010

Construction inflation has reduced the buying power of the United States’ gas tax by 60% over the past 17 years. A dollar into the Highway Trust Fund now only purchases forty cents in highway maintenance or improvements of what it purchased in 1993, the last time the motor fuels tax was increased. Transportation Reauthorization is probably the only opportunity to increase transportation revenue for the next 6-8 years.

Using debt tools including tolling and infrastructure banks, public private partnerships and funding from the General Fund seem to be the only ideas being explored in Washington, DC and on the campaign trail.  These tools may have a place in the toolbox to increase transportation revenue for urban areas but are not the type of revenues needed to maintain and expand highways in the Ports-to-Plains Alliance region.

The Ports-to-Plains Alliance advocacy message rests on the premise that rural highways connect urban areas to markets, to resources including energy and agriculture, and to tourism opportunities.  It is narrow in vision to believe that responding to urban areas’ transportation issues with congestion relief, high speed rail and transit without increasing funding for rural connections and mobility, freight and safety addresses the nation’s transportation.  Our nation’s transportation system still requires rural highways and interstates.  It is a message that our communities need to hear.

There are few alternatives for transportation funding.  What should we do as a nation?

• Do nothing
  • A position held by few, but usually part of a belief associated with no new taxes
  • Defer Infrastructure Investment
  • At least 25% less federal transportation funding into future years
  • Pushing the cost to a later generation
• Cover the Transportation Funding Shortfall from the General Fund
  • This is what has happened in the extensions of SAFETEA-LU
  • Creates debt thereby increases deficit
  • Highway funding becomes less of a user pay system that must now compete for general tax dollars annually and more politically driven
• Increase Revenue
  • Tolling, Public Private Partnerships, Bonding and other Debt Tools provide little for rural corridors.
  • Urban areas which may benefit will still want their share of the fuel tax
  • Gas tax is the only current funding … requires 10 cents per gallon to maintain funding levels in the current transportation bill (SAFETEA-LU).

Remember that the Alliance has developed the  Ports-To-Plains Alliance SAFETEA-LU Reauthorization Recommendations to assist you in making the case.  If you need printed copies of this document please contact the Lubbock office.

You can make a difference.