tolls – RI Future

February 9, 2016

‘Anti-toll’ Republicans sign onto huge pro-toll bill

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Republican Representatives Patricia Morgan and Dan Reilly have been making a major push to stop the truck tolls in the RhodeWorks proposal. With great vigor, they have branded their efforts as anti-toll, specifically making the argument that the truck tolls are a step on the way to car tolls. Yet despite their stated opposition to tolls, Morgan and Reilly have signed onto a bill that would drastically expand tolls in Rhode Island.

The bill, which is sponsored by conservative Democrat Jared Nunes, creates a special board with the power to privatize any transportation project, allowing private corporations to levy unrestricted tolls on Rhode Island road users. Under the proposal, private corporations could approach the privatization board, and the board could approve privatization with tolls without any required legislative approval. (The bill does provide for entirely optional legislative review.) The language in the legislation is extremely broad, allowing a wide array of potential tolling schemes, including tolls on passenger cars.

As part of the Republican Policy Group’s campaign against RhodeWorks, Morgan and Reilly supported an alternate proposal without tolls. Controversially, their plan did not specify where all the money would come from. At the heart of their proposal was redirecting DMV revenue, money that has already been spoken for in the state budget. (This redirecting revenue tactic is not unique to the GOP. During her campaign, Gina Raimondo proposed paying for school construction by redirecting sales tax revenue that was already being used in the budget.) Despite this, the Republican Policy Group’s anti-toll plan became a major initiative of Morgan, Reilly, and other Republican representatives.

Privatizing roads and bridges to let private corporations charge tolls is a popular policy idea among Republicans across the country. In Indiana, for instance, Republican Governor Mitch Daniels successfully championed a plan to sell off the right to toll Interstate 90 to a foreign corporation, saying, “You’re either for this bill, or you’re against our future.” (Later, the plan went bankrupt.)

January 28, 2016January 28, 2016

Truck Tolls, Take 2: Revised plan presented

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State leaders presented their revised truck toll plan at the State House today, with legislation being introduced in both the House and the Senate this afternoon.

“This proposal fixes our roads and bridges and is good for our economy,” said Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello, “We are not going to be last any more.”

“New plan expressly prohibits tolling passenger vehicles because this was “important to Rhode Islanders,” said Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed.

RIDOT director Peter Alviti, Jr. said 150 structurally deficient bridges and 50 not quite deficient bridges will be repaired over the next ten years in this plan. 14 gantry locations have been identified “right now.”

By 2025 we will have the bridges in this state only 10% structurally deficient, said Alviti.

We have requests for an additionally $600 million in repair requests from local cities and towns, said Alviti.

RhodeWorks is the same program, funding is different, said Alviti.

This will rely on Garvey bond/financing, with some savings through refinancing, said Raimondo, Mattiello and Paiva Weed. It leverages federal money.

It’s the way these things are always done in Rhode Island, said Raimondo.

Connecticut will be tolling cars and trucks next year, said Mattiello. “We can’t have a robust economy with the worst infrastructure in the country.”

“It’s the best approach for Rhode Islanders,” said Mattiello. “Don’t listen to the rhetoric of trucks today, cars tomorrow.”

The RI Constitution is a “sacred document and you don’t change it over de minimus issues,” said Mattiello.

“The avoidance and diversion issue is not as real an issue as some people suggest,” said Mattiello, in essence denying that trucks will drive too far out of their way to avoid tolls.

Here’s the press release:

Governor Gina M. Raimondo, House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello, and Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed this afternoon announced revised RhodeWorks legislation that takes into account new federal funding. The legislation puts people back to work repairing our crumbling infrastructure and provides the reliable, sustainable source of revenue necessary to rebuild our bridges, which are ranked the worst in the country.

With the addition of the new federal funding, the revised legislation cuts the amount of bonding in half (from $600 million to $300 million) and reduces interest costs by more than 65%. The legislation also strengthens the prohibition on tolling passenger vehicles by adding a condition that a vote of the people be required for any legislative changes to toll cars.

See the comparison here: http://www.dot.ri.gov/documents/news/RhodeWorks_Bill_Comparison.pdf
And a fact sheet on the updates here: http://www.dot.ri.gov/documents/news/RhodeWorks_Fact_Sheet.pdf

The legislation will be introduced this afternoon in the House by Majority Leader John DeSimone and in the Senate by Majority Leader Dominick Ruggerio.

The Governor, Speaker, and Senate President issued the following statements today:

Governor Gina M. Raimondo

“I am grateful for the partnership of the Speaker and Senate President to take action and get this done. Rhode Island has the worst bridges in the country: we’re ranked 50th out of 50 states. We can no longer afford the politics of procrastination; we need to invest more. This proposal will allow us to move quickly to repair our roads and bridges, and put Rhode Islanders back to work, without raising taxes on Rhode Island families and small businesses.

“Because of new federal funding, we were able to strengthen the proposal: we’ve lowered the maximum truck toll amount, decreased the number of gantries, and significantly reduced the state’s interest payments. I look forward to continuing to work with the House and Senate to pass this legislation and grow our economy.”

House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello:

“I commend the Governor for taking into account the additional federal highway funding heading to our state and proposing a vastly improved plan to the legislature that will create jobs, increase our state’s wealth, and most importantly, repair our badly deficient roads, bridges and overpasses. A sound infrastructure is essential to a thriving economy, and this is a step we must take to be more competitive with other states. The new federal money also allows our state to borrow much less with greatly reduced interest costs and risk.

“Despite the scare tactics of opponents of this proposal who only want to hold our economy back, the toll plan only includes large commercial trucks. There are now safeguards in the legislation to assure our citizens that tolls will never be extended to cars without voter approval.”

Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed:

“The passage of federal highway funding in December has enabled the development of a new RhodeWorks plan that dramatically reduces borrowing. Most Rhode Islanders agree we need to invest in our roads and bridges. The Governor’s RhodeWorks plan remains the best proposal to address this challenge. It provides the surge in funding which is necessary to accomplish projects quickly, and save taxpayers from more costly repairs in the long run. It would toll only large tractor trailer trucks, the ones causing most of the vehicle-caused damage to our roads and bridges, while expressly prohibiting extension of tolls to passenger vehicles.”

[From a press release]

January 27, 2016

Paiva Weed on attracting green industries to RI, tolls and education funding

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Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed said her Grow Green Jobs RI initiative would help Rhode Island become the national leader in green, sustainable and resilient industries.

“There is great potential within the emerging green industries,” she told me in an extended interview one day after introducing a report that lays out her policy recommendations. “If we as a state position ourselves to maximize all available opportunities it will in fact move us forward and secure for us national recognition.”

The initiative already enjoys broad support in the private sector – from the chamber of commerce to organized labor, she pointed out. And she expects legislators from both chambers will champion the bills as protecting the environment is a bi-partisan cause in the Ocean State. “House, Senate, Democrat, Republican and I guess each of us have an independent,” she said. “It’s really a shared value.”

Carbon pricing bill

Paiva Weed is reserving judgment on the carbon pricing bill introduced yesterday in the House by Rep. Aaron Regunberg. “There is obviously not the same kind of agreement among business and environmentalists on that issue as many are concerned about Rhode Island being an outlier,” she told me. “I absolutely support the goal of the legislation without question. The question is from a business point of view how do we as a region, as a country, internationally, remain competitive and address our concerns regarding carbon.”

Tolls

Representing Newport and Jamestown, Paiva Weed serves the only two communities in Rhode Island that already have toll gantries. She said local bridges managed by the Turnpike and Bridge Authority, funded by tolls, are in demonstrably better condition than those maintained by the DOT, funded through the state budget.

“We have safe, well maintained bridges in Newport, in Jamestown and in the Mt. Hope bridge for one reason: because the individuals who use those bridges pay tolls,” she said. “Every other overpass in the state that I can think of if you drive under is a danger. They are falling down, they are decrepit, they are a danger both to the people over and under them.”

Education

A staunch advocate of progressive education funding, Paiva Weed said Rhode Island needs to continue its recent tradition of increasing state education funding. She added that it’s important to fix the funding formula so that it stops punishing traditional school districts for sending a high number of students to charter schools.

“As charter schools have developed the structure of the funding formula failed to recognize that there would be a tipping point at which the diversion of funds from the traditional public education system would negatively impact the traditional public school system,” she said. “If we as a state supported school choice, which we said we did when we passed the legislation years ago creating charter schools, then we would need to recognize that tipping point and provide additional funds for communities that have more of a draw on their base from charters.”

Listen to the full 23 minute interview here:

January 5, 2016

Licenses for All rally rocks opening session at State House

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When Governor Gina Raimondo was a candidate, she did not promise to partner with the legislature to work out a solution to the problem of undocumented workers and access to driver’s licenses. She said that she would issue an executive order compelling the DMV to begin issuing such licenses within her first year in office. In fact, she signed her name to that promise. Raimondo has two days to make good on her word, or it will be a campaign promise broken.

To remind her of her promise, members of RI Jobs With Justice, Fuerza Laboral, English for Action, the Providence Student Union and others rallied at the State House outside the House chambers, demanding that their voices be heard and that promises be kept. As Speaker Nicholas Mattiello puttered about inside the House chambers, metaphorically polishing his gavel and preparing for the new legislative session, advocates for licenses were lead in chants by Juan Garcia and shouted the Speaker’s name.

Mattiello ignored the protesters.

Overlapping with the “Licenses for All” rally was a “No Tolls” rally. This rally was made up primarily of conservative anti-tax groups. This coalition was protesting against the proposed truck tolls, which the tax groups feel are a slippery slope to car tolls. There was some friction when members of the anti-toll rally took issue with the undocumented workers agitating for licenses, with one angry man leading a small group in screaming, “Go home!” over and over again.

Later those rallying for licenses chanted, “We pay taxes!”

Speaker Mattiello told Gene Valicenti on WPRO that he didn’t, “expect to be moved” by the toll protest, and he seemed equally unmoved by the Licenses for All rally. One wonders what does move the Speaker if our democratic process and exercise of our First Amendment rights are so inconsequential.

Time running out for Raimondo to keep undocumented resident driver’s license promise

Coalition demands driver’s licenses for all, regardless of immigration status

June 25, 2015

Toll bill unlikely to see House floor despite bridge closure

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The prospect of Governor Gina Raimondo’s Rhode Works legislation hitting the House floor before the end of this legislation is highly unlikely, Speaker Nicholas Mattiello said today.

“Right now, I’m not planning on it coming to the House floor by week’s end,” he said. “I have substantial concerns. I’ve indicated that the House is not going to act upon this bill until the concerns of our local business community are adequately addressed.”

Speaker Mattiello also said that he believes the proposal requires more analysis, so he is not comfortable introducing it in the House quite yet.

“It’s a big proposal, a big project, and I think the calls for it to move forward thoughtfully are probably the right calls and the right way to approach this. There’s no reason to rush this, there are reasons to do it in a timely manner, but there’s absolutely no reason to rush it,” he said.

This announcement comes a day after the Park Avenue bridge in Cranston was closed by RIDOT due to safety concerns. The bridge was suffering from severe deterioration and was “in imminent danger of collapse,” RIDOT Director Peter Alviti said in a letter to the Governor.

Speaker Mattiello finds the closure curious considering the bridge was examined nine months ago, and was deemed structurally deficient, but safe for travel.

“Where I call for an investigation is, you have the DOT making an assessment that it requires a high degree of corrective action in order to stay open, and no action is taken for nine months,” he said. His main concern is that Cranstonians, and especially safety vehicles, are now incredibly inconvenienced, because no steps were taken to prevent the closure.

“If they knew nine months ago that it was going to require a high priority of corrective action, why wasn’t any corrective action taken? That is something an investigation by DOT, I’d like to know what they’re doing.” he said.

Speaker Mattiello added that DOT is at fault for the closure, as they did not do what they are called to do for the community.

“You can’t just let a bridge go to the point of failure and say ‘Sorry, we’re shutting it down because we failed.’ That’s what they’re doing. They didn’t ask for anything, they didn’t tell us they had any concern.”

However, the Speaker did note that he agrees with RIDOT’s decision, but wishes that they take corrective action to have the bridge open back up as soon as possible.

Currently, there are nine bridges throughout the state undergoing investigations, and 17 that have been completed through RIDOT’s accelerated inspection program, which Alviti ordered in early May.

The timing of the closure did not work in Rhode Works’ favor. Minutes after the bridge was closed, Senate Finance unanimously approved the bill, and later that night it was approved on the Senate floor in a 33-4 vote. If the closure was a stunt to get Mattiello’s attention, he was not impressed.

“I can tell you it’s not going to force my hand on Rhode Works,” he said. “That’s not the right way to get my attention.”

June 23, 2015June 24, 2015

RIDOT continues Rhode Works defense in House Finance

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The House Finance Committee took lengthy testimony from the Rhode Island Department of Transportation on Monday afternoon as the agency defended its Rhode Works program with renewed vigor. Representatives from RIDOT spoke for three hours, echoing many of sentiments they have previously made about the initiative, before answering many questions from representatives who remain unclear about what the state needs to give up to achieve what Rhode Works promises.

One of the biggest concerns for the committee was the success of the program, and whether or not RIDOT will actually be able to pay back the $500 million bond they are asking from the state, as well as make good use of the total $1.4 billion to fund the program. Representative Patricia Morgan (R- District 26) has been Rhode Works’ most vocal opponent, wondering why RIDOT cannot repair bridges with its existing funding.

Peter Alviti, the director of RIDOT, said the existing funding they have is not enough to sufficiently repair or reconstruct the 155 bridges that are structurally deficient.

The $500 million bond would pay the expenses for the 17 possible toll locations, leaving that money open for other locations.

“The rest of the money would then have adequate funds to not only reconstruct, but to operate and maintain the facilities,” he said.

Jonathan Wormer, director of the Office of Management and Budget, added that the borrowed money for the initiative would be used to keep bridges from becoming structurally deficient, because they would have the money up front to do so. The goal of the bond is to compress the time in which the bridges can be reconstructed.

“If you don’t fix them at the beginning, it costs them a lot more later,” Wormer said.

The revised version of the bill also contains $13.5 million worth in tax breaks and property rebates for truckers, as well as per day toll caps, which have raised questions about its legality. Some have expressed fear that the tax breaks would discourage interstate commerce, and violate the commerce clause in the United States Constitution. But, RIDOT has asserted that the breaks and tolls are legal.

After nearly three hours of questioning, the Rhode Island Trucking Association, which has opposed the bill from the beginning, brought in American Trucking Association Vice President Bob Pitcher to speak on their behalf.

“We object to the bill before you because of the means it would use to raise the money,” he said. “We believe the proposal would weaken Rhode Island’s economy unnecessarily.”

The biggest objection by Rhode Works opponents is that legislators are rushing into signing it in the last days of session, and possibly overlooking any flaws it might have.

“I’ve never seen anything so vague in a tax law. Tax laws normally say who pays what, and this one does not,” Pitcher continued, adding that Rhode Works is an unprecedented piece of legislation. “No other state has sought to toll multiple state highways or bridges. Because there is literally no experience in such tolling elsewhere, Rhode Island should be doubly cautious.”

In their calculations, RIDOT estimated a 25 percent diversion rate, or that 25 percent of truckers would avoid going through Rhode Island if they were to implement the tolls. Both Alviti and Wormer expressed that this number was very conservative, especially because the plan minimizes the chance for diversions. They also added that only about two percent of trucking companies’ budgets are spent on tolls. Pitcher believes that they have underestimated their diversion rate, in part because tolls don’t exist in large parts of the country.

Many other opponents came forward to testify against the bill, reiterating the worry that the bill has been moving through the State House too fast. In a press release, the Rhode Island Trucking Association called upon Governor Gina Raimondo to create a committee to investigate the bill, rather than push it through at the last minute.

“This process is moving entirely too fast and there have been no discussions or analysis on the fiscal impact of the proposed toll plan to the trucking industry or the business community,” said RITA President Christopher Maxwell.

Other groups have shown support for Rhode Works, including AAA Northeast, The Sierra Club, Grow Smart RI, and Building America’s Future, a national, bipartisan group of elected officials dedicated to infrastructure improvement.

No vote was taken on Monday, but a vote on a version of the bill expected in Senate Finance on Tuesday.

June 19, 2015June 20, 2015

Tax breaks for truckers in new Senate toll bill

The Senate Lounge was standing room only before and during the hearing.

A Senate version of Governor Raimondo’s truck toll proposal, also known as Rhode Works, contains tax breaks for truckers.

The new version of the bill, sponsored by Sen. Dominick Ruggerio (D- District 4), and heard by the Finance Committee Thursday, includes $13.5 million in tax credits and rebates for truckers. They would receive tax credits on their registration fees, rebates on their gas and property taxes, as well as $3 million in grants for those who frequent TF Green Airport and Quonset Business Park.

RIDOT has also slightly reworked their funding formula for the proposal, asking for $500 million in revenue bonds, rather than $700 million. According to Director Peter Alviti, the difference would be bridged by refinancing some of the debt the Department already owes the state, which would give them another $120 million. Without that $80 million to complete the funding, Alviti said the Rhode Works program would be extended over a longer period of time, 30 years, to achieve the same goal. With this new schedule, RIDOT’s interest would increase, and they would eventually pay back $1 billion to the state. According to RIDOT, the total funding for the project would be over $4 billion.

The proposal is based on a serious need to repair Rhode Island’s bridge and road infrastructure, which is ranked 50^th in the United States. During the hearing, Alviti stressed safety as one of the main reasons for Rhode Works’ existence.

“This is becoming a more frequent problem, and it will become more frequent in the days and weeks coming unless we do something now,” he said.

The program would also create 11,000 job years in the construction industry. RIDOT also anticipates $60 million each year in revenue from the proposed tolls, $38 million of which would be put towards fees owed to the state. Any other revenue from tolls would directly go towards the repair of bridges and roads. RIDOT plans to reconstruct 155 bridges using this money, as well as upkeep others that are currently in fair condition. The tolls would only charge tractor-trailers, costing them $.69 per mile in Rhode Island, while most other states in the northeast are $1 or more per mile.

“It’s understandable that there’s a certain amount of resistance to the changes we’re proposing. But it’s a fair cost,” Alviti said.

Jonathan Wormer, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, also gave testimony in support of Rhode Works, and explained how much these tolls will end up costing the trucking companies. There are 123 trucks that drive explicitly in Rhode Island all day, whose tolls would be capped at $60 for the whole day, costing the company just under $1.8 million. The 3,111 interstate trucks that come through the state would be capped at $30 per day, and cost $14.9 million. Such toll costs are only about two percent of what companies spend per year. Fuel is considerably more, at 39 percent.

These fees would be collected via EZ Pass, which many truckers that pass through the state already have. If they do not, RIDOT would also implement camera technology that would charge the owner of the license plate. Alviti stared during the hearing that they would not build any tollbooths that would hold up traffic. There are 17 possible locations that the department is looking to install these gantries.

Although most of this information has been revised from the previous bill, Christopher Maxwell, the President of the Rhode Island Trucking Association, said it’s still not ready to become law. “The debate and dialogue should continue, it should not end now. It should begin now that we have all the information,” he told Senate Finance members.

Maxwell believes that directly tolling tractor-trailers will violate the commerce clause in the United States Constitution, and discourage interstate commerce. He stated that no other state is exclusively tolling trucks.

“This does clearly put interstate commerce, and these carriers that you’re not giving breaks to, at a disadvantage,” he said. So much of a disadvantage, that Maxwell added that his association could provide legal proof that such a toll would violate the commerce clause.

“We want to be part of the solution, we are not part of this bill,” he added, citing that the association does have ideas on what RIDOT should do, but did not offer an explanation of what those ideas are at the hearing.

Local truckers came to speak out against the bill as well. Frank Nardone, one truck driver, explained that he avoids tolls in almost all of his routes, and Rhode Island would be no different.

“I don’t like to pay tolls, I don’t think they’re necessary,” Nardone said. According to Nardone, tolls are not the way to make money, especially because Rhode Island truckers already have to pay $388 for the road use tax.

“I think I’m being taxed enough,” he said.

Ed Alfredi owns a trucking company based in Smithfield, and in his testimony, said that Rhode Works makes it impossible to figure out exactly how much the tolls would cost his business.

“If I was to try and sit down, and see what this was going to cost me and my company, it’s very difficult, because there’s no facts,” he said. “It’s going to have an effect, and we should be able to have an exact figure of what these tolls are, where exactly they’re going to be.”

Time is of the essence for the governor’s proposal. While those opposed want more, those in support keep pressing forward, wanting to pass the legislation as quickly as possible. If their efforts fail, Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello has hinted at a special fall session in order to fully consider the bill.

June 5, 2015June 5, 2015

Tolls, trucks and transportation: the contours of this debate

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Speaker Nicolas Mattiello has indicated that he may not include tolls for trucks on Rhode Island highways. I’d like to summarize the debate and highlight some ways that Rhode Island can move forward with reasonable compromises on this issue.

Singling out one industry

The trucking industry has been remarkably successful with a talking point: they say that tolling trucks is “singling out one industry” for a special charge. This raises the hackles of business-oriented members of the Assembly.

Expect more. Pay less. Strong Towns blog says this is more than just a slogan for the trucking industry.

The truth of the matter is that truckers are being singled out: for an unusually large subsidy. Director Peter Alviti of RIDOT spoke Monday night for several hours at the Finance Committee meeting, and one of the most important points he made is that trucks cause around 3/4 of the damage on roads, but only pay 19% of the costs of upkeeping them. With new tolls, that number would double, but essentially trucks will still be paying fifty cents to the dollar for the damage they leave behind them.

Some members of the Finance Committee were concerned at what it would mean if trucks decided to circumvent Rhode Island for through-trips. While it’s always smart to think about how a particular tax or fee might be evaded, in this case the worry doesn’t make sense. The truckers are like customers who show up to your lemonade stand: each cup is costing you a dollar to make, but you charge them $0.50 each time. This is a financial loss. You can’t make up that loss on volume, as any fifth grader could tell you. And so the only trucks we should really want in our state (at least at the present toll rates) are those that directly serve our households or businesses. And try as they might, truckers who are coming to directly serve us can’t avoid the tolls.

Fiscally-conservative urbanist blog Strong Towns talks very clearly in this article about why “the real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels.”

Why are we bonding for infrastructure?

A serious concern which may be holding up tolls are questions about whether we should be bonding (taking on public debt) to fund infrastructure projects. The tolls raise $700 million plus $200 million for debt service to repay the bonds. Concerns about bonding were raised by left (Rep. Tanzi) and right (Rep. Patricia Morgan), but were generally raised more intensely by conservative members of the Finance Committee.

Portland, Oregon’s Harbor Drive was once a highway. No longer.

Director Alviti pointed out that the long-term cost of our bridges falling into disrepair and needing to be completely replaced is much higher than the $200 million in debt service. Of course, said the director, there is a cost to financing these projects. But the overall net effect is a savings for taxpayers. Alviti used a metaphor over and over: fixing a road or bridge now is akin to replacing the broken hinge on a door. Waiting for perfect financing is like letting the door fall off the hinges and break entirely.

The ugliness of Harbor Drive when it was a highway belies the fact that highway infrastructure is also more expensive, and worse for development and the environment.

I agree with Director Alviti’s metaphor, but would like to expand on it. Debt service to help us fix our projects now is somewhat akin to fixing a hinge, instead of replacing the door. The difference is that in Rhode Island, we have a house that has too many doors.

With 4:7 dollars from the tolls going to capital expenses for the 6/10 Connector, the state should be giving serious consideration to whether we’re overbuilt in our highway system. Already, I’ve been very encouraged (and, frankly, surprised) at the outpouring of bipartisan support for exploring a boulevard on 6/10 to save money. A boulevard would be better for Providence and Cranston neighborhoods, would be better for our environment, but would also greatly reduce costs. This morning, Rep. Patricia Morgan tweeted me to signal her support, joining a consensus that includes West Side Councilman Bryan Principe, UNITE-HERE local 217, Environmental Committee Chair Art B. Handy, Minority Leader Brian C. Newberry, and Rep. Daniel Reilly. You really could not find a more politically diverse group of people who agree on this issue. As Speaker Mattiello explores whether to continue to subsidize the trucking industry, he should address the concerns of fiscal conservatives by including language in the toll bill requiring RIDOT to explore reduction of highway capacity as a cost-saving option.

Contact the Speaker

It needs to be clear to Speaker Mattiello that Rhode Islanders expect him to charge a fair(er) price for truck use of our highways. To not do so is to put the cost on the backs of other road users, and possibly leave our roads in a condition that is embarrassing and unsafe. But Mattiello should address the concerns of fiscal conservatives as well, mandating a reduction of costs by an over-stretched RIDOT.

Fiscal conservatives and environmental/social justice liberals have a budding consensus that part of the problem with our road system is that we’re spending too much money for bad outcomes. Addressing this is a way forward: The Speaker can reduce the overall amount of money needed to be raised, thus lowering tolls. Conservatives will feel that they’ve had a victory. Liberals, too, will be happy. And our state’s infrastructure needs will be addressed in a way that gives all sides part of what they want.

Contact Speaker Mattiello’s office, and email me at transportprovidence@gmail.com or tweet me @transportpvd to let me know that you have.

~~~~

March 4, 2015

Subsidized parking as substitute for justice

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The Next City takes on gentrification–by proposing subsidized housing? Nope. Subsidized parking.

Over and over, I have had many frustrating conversations with people who don’t understand how egalitarian policies and land-use/transportation fit together, to the point that I’ve been working on a piece to parse apart the details. Just as I was on my fourth or fifth draft, a perfect example of people having all the right impulses in all the wrong places fell right into my lap like a ripe apple.

Exhibit A: Seattle advocates want to fix poverty by complaining about development and subsidizing parking. Face palm! According to The Next City, a Philadelphia-based urbanist blog, the proposal would:

1) Honor all requests for low-income restricted parking zone; 2) Charge no more than five dollars per year for low-income restricted parking permits; and 3) Allow restricted parking zone permits for registered nonprofits located within a restricted parking zone.

The Next City goes on to say:

On its face, Sen. Jayapal’s revision reads like a NIMBYish cry to protect her constituents’ parking as transit expands and density increases.

Ding ding ding! We have a winner! But then The Next City says:

In reality, it is part of a broader effort to protect some of Seattle’s most diverse and lowest-income communities from the high risks of displacement that rode into the neighborhood on light rail.

Um, no.

A tri-cornered hat

There are three basic progressive policy choices on any given issue, but the three do not always overlap. It’s important to understand the differences between them, because shooting from the hip without clarity sends you all over the map.

Leave people alone. This is like the null hypothesis. There are lots of times when we should do something, but having a policy choice that says “do nothing” reminds us to think clearly about what we’re trying to accomplish, and whether we’re overstepping our bounds and creating a new problem out of whole cloth.
Set a policy that equalizes people’s position. This is a huge one. There’s no end to the moral and practical reasons we should want to eliminate the unnatural wealth gap that exists in this country.
Set a policy that incentivizes people’s behavior. Of course, fighting inequality relies on incentives, but the best poverty fighting does that and leaves everything else alone. So this category sums up policies that incentivize other things; examples include pay-as-you-throw trash collection, tolls and congestion pricing, and fines for not shoveling one’s sidewalk.

These three policy goals are not the same! Don’t tell me that pay-as-you-throw trash collection means that creating more trash costs more, and is therefore regressive. That would be the case if we fail to have option #2 in our policy array, because then very unequal people would be paying market prices without any counterbalance to ensure they stay within reach of one another. And for sure, our country doesn’t do very well with #2. But Fixing the lack of equality with #1 or #3 doesn’t work. It just creates a mess.

Let’s break it down

Leave it alone: Gentrification, which I will define here as the displacement of poor people from a neighborhood when wealthier people move in, mostly doesn’t exist. So at the outset, I bristle at the article because it misdiagnoses a positive thing as a problem.

A very wide-ranging study of 1,100 U.S. Census tracts from 1970 to the present shows that most high poverty census tracts stayed that way, that we actually gained some high poverty Census tracts, and that those Census tracts that did get new investment mostly maintained the same number of low income people, while simply gaining higher income people alongside them (that mix, the study found, actually ameliorated poverty, while in the most isolated Census tracts, poor people’s lives got worse). Although not concerned by gentrification per se, the study concluded that poverty remains a serious, wrenching problem that should actively confronted by government. Daniel Kay Hertz does a really great breakdown of the information in the context of Chicago, and This Old City has some great, specific data on housing prices in Philadelphia (the data pre-date the study). The point is, the model we have that says we have to jump in to stop gentrification is mostly wrong.

If your neighborhood is popular, that’s a good thing. But you should make sure there’s enough housing to allow everyone to enjoy that. And in a lot of cases that means leaving things alone.

Equalize people: The same study on gentrification that concluded that housing development should be allowed to happen, even encouraged, in gentrifying areas also concluded that deep, centralized, isolating poverty remains a problem in the U.S. It won’t be news to anyone here that poverty is, in fact, growing. So while under #1. we talked about how to leave something alone that’s not a problem, under #2 we should focus on how to change something that is a dire problem.

Some of the best programs that equalize people included the 1950s consensus to have an income tax system that decreased the income and wealth gap in the U.S. by creating an effective maximum wage, a proposed program for a guaranteed minimum income or its cousin the Earned Income Tax Credit. Other examples include the Estate Tax, which at the federal and state level has always been a way to equalize the inherited wealth gap. What’s perfect about these programs is they very squarely take on the problem of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, but they stay hands off about exactly what it is that people do with the money beyond that. But that brings us to #3. . .

Incentivize behavior: In general, it’s good to let people have choices, but sometimes there is a society-wide reason for pushing people to make a particular decision. You would hope that one of the behaviors that cities would want to encourage would be driving less, and in fact, Seattle is a city that has made huge strides in that direction, moving from above 50% of urban core trips by single-occupant drivers to just around 30% in just a short time. But a program of subsidizing parking, though intended to accomplish the goals under #2, is actually a really bad conflation with #3. It incentivizes behavior: the wrong behavior.

These three categories fit together. You want to leave alone development–i.e., gentrification–and in fact, where housing prices have risen to the point of pushing low income residents out, it has been because zoning or other policies have gotten in the way of housing growth. You do want to take from the rich and give to the poor, but not in a way that interferes with that. And you absolutely want to push people away from cars, so your incentives shouldn’t nudge people towards them.

We get these three all mixed up. We don’t leave housing development alone. We put all sorts of constraints on it, from not allowing federally-backed lending for apartments, to zoning against density and for parking, to spending more than half of our road money on road expansion in order to encourage sprawl. We certainly don’t effectively deal with poverty. The top income tax rate used to be 90%, and the point of that was to create a disincentive against ridiculous executive salaries, simply and elegantly, and instead incentivize reinvestment into middle income jobs and capital improvements. And everything, everything we can think of goes into making driving easier. Alongside the pittance of money for walking, biking, and transit, we throw huge subsidies towards parking fees, new garages, wider roads, cheaper oil–and all of it, we say, is because we want to keep the American Dream alive.

The results are summed up pretty well by Angie Schmitt:

The suburbs: In exchange for your "free" — not really free — parking you are chained to two cars that cost you 18% of your income. #win!

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) February 25, 2015

And, of course, any policy that mixes things up this way has the potential to help some poor people along with many middle class people, and leave some poor people completely out in the cold.

It’s so frustrating when you’re explaining to someone how to fix transportation or land use policy and that person responds by placing those goals at odds with equity. There couldn’t be anything further from the truth. If we could straighten out the differences between different policy options, we could have clearer conversations about the huge range of problems that face us.

~~~~

February 25, 2015February 25, 2015

Raimondo toll plan deserves progressive support

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Tolls are the way to go, says Gov. Raimondo, and we need to have her back on that.

As Gov. Raimondo recently pointed out, Rhode Island has some of the highest per-mile costs for road infrastructure. In addition to that, as I’ve pointed out right here at RI Future, much of that road infrastructure is highway oriented, even in our cities. Providence is among a rogue collection of cities in the Rustbelt Midwest, Texas, and California for its lane-miles of highway infrastructure per capita.

That means that our poorest areas where people often don’t have access to cars are choked by highways, causing air pollution and congestion that would otherwise be avoided with a multimodal system. The costs of this type of highway infrastructure are many orders of magnitude higher than other projects, and also at the same time stand in the way of development in urban areas. These factors act as both a push and pull force against our economic development and climate change goals.

One way Gov. Raimondo has sought to fix the imbalance of spending is to use tolls to provide some of our road funding. I know that there’s going to be lots of howling from all sides, so I want to preempt it and say to the governor, “Thank you! Well done!”

Tolls are not popular on the left or the right. The right, of course, unaware of how socialized and unbalanced policies around driving have become, cries that tolls are a “war on cars“. In Rhode Island, we’ve seen tea party vandalism against toll collection efforts on the Sakonnet Bridge. Sometimes elements of the left don’t understand the issue well either, seeing tolls as a way of stepping away from the responsibility of government to pay directly for infrastructure costs through general funds. I believe both are mistaken.

It’s correct to use government to invest in public infrastructure and lessen inequalities. Road spending is simply the least efficient way to do it. Although all classes of people drive to some extent, the poorest drive the least. Certainly if you want to help the odd person who is poor and happens to drive, there are more direct ways to target the aid. Though road projects cause a blooming of development, the revenue from the development does not add up to enough over the long-term to pay back the costs of the maintenance on infrastructure. Tolls are an equitable way to pay for road infrastructure. Paying for roads in this way also means that the general funds we have can be repurposed to more important and directly progressive goals, like an increased Earned Income Tax Credit in the state.

I call on the governor not only to toll highway-type infrastructure, but also to look carefully at how we can reduce unnecessary road expenditures. We need long distance roads in parts of our state, but our urban areas are far too choked by highways. The Route 10 section of the 6/10 Connector is now the oldest highway in the state, cuts neighborhoods in Providence and Cranston off from one another, makes the Washington Secondary bike path less useful, and prevents development along a prime corridor of urban land. Removing highways like Rt. 10 and building them in less expensive, more multimodal ways would lower our state’s costs, allowing tolls to be less extreme (I think Rt. 6 should go too, but its infrastructure is newer–some of it, in fact, is being replaced at great cost right now–so that may have to wait).

The progressive community needs to put its elbow grease into supporting tolling as one of the tools we use in transportation. It’s up to us to organize and educate constituencies for this, or else the governor’s proposal will fail.

~~~~

March 18, 2014March 19, 2014

RI lawmakers propose sequester to replace Sakonnet tolls

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There’s a new plan out to replace the Sakonnet River Bridge Tolls. For the next six years, discretionary spending will be slashed in every department by 0.25%, until the total cut is 1.5%. Funneled into a transportation infrastructure trust fund, those dollars will hopefully eliminate the need for tolls on the Sakonnet River Bridge.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Known as a “sequester,” this tactic of across-the-board cuts was controversially implemented at the federal level as a Democratic concession in the 2011 debt ceiling standoff.

Given that I’ve staked out a pretty solid position on the Democratic side of public policy debates, you might be surprised to hear that I’m not calling on legislators to vote down this bill. That’s because I consider tolls a really bad idea. They’re , hitting the lower middle class especially hard. Although it’s difficult to properly assess, tolls do economic damage as well–possibly almost as much as sequesters. So I can’t blame a legislator who votes for this bill.

But we should not forget the pain these austerity policies are causing our state. Few states have caught austerity fever as aggressively as Rhode Island. Slashing jobs to the point where we have the second fewest per capita public sector employees in the country, Rhode Island has gone all in on the budget cut strategy. (And somehow, we still found the money to give the wealthy big tax cuts.)

Part of the goal of sequesters is to spread the pain so thin no that one will be too upset. Instead of directly slashing one program, the state will be asking every department to squeeze things just a little bit harder, cutting a few jobs in each department instead of concentrating the cuts in one specific area. The hope is that this will reduce the political opposition. As Rep. Jay Edwards, chief bill sponsor, put it on Newsmakers:

If a department can’t cut their own budget by a quarter percent every year and look forward to it, then they are not doing a good enough job.

This is the kind of thinking we must avoid. It probably is true that distributing the cuts like this makes the damage less visible, but it doesn’t make it any less real. This sequester will cost our state jobs. And of course it’s much better policy to direct the cuts towards less important programs than to take this meat-axe approach.

Michael Lewis, the Director of the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, expressed similar concerns. Explaining that his “concern with the plan is that it doesn’t contain new revenue,” Director Lewis cautioned that, “somewhere in the state budget, something is going to suffer,” and we “have to think about what kind of impact that’s going to have on the overall state budget.” He’s right. We can’t forget the pain these cuts will inflict.

What makes this story so tragic is that there is a really easy free lunch solution to our infrastructure crisis. In America, states traditionally finance infrastructure with cheap general obligation bonds. Underfunding infrastructure maintenance can often lead to a higher effective interest rate than you would pay on bonds, since replacing unmaintained bridges is much more expensive than just maintaining them properly. That’s exactly what happened with the old Sakonnet River Bridge.

Given record low interest rates, now would be the fiscally responsible time to take out the infrastructure bonds we know we’re going to have to do, and with the Fed already tightening, this next bonding cycle may well be our last chance to access rock-bottom interest rates. Curiously, our state government has spurned this incredible opportunity. There were no transportation bonds on the 2012 ballot. When we take out those inevitable bonds, we’ll be paying much higher rates, and our roads and bridges will have continued to crumble, bringing the bill even higher than it would be today. Plus, we will have missed out on all the jobs we could have created.

January 14, 2014

Why user fees make sense for roads

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Several times in the course of Twitter conversations, C. Andrew Morse of Anchor Rising has challenged my claim that user fees (for example, tolls) are a conservative method of paying for a road. I challenged him to back that statement up.

Morse states his case this way:

1. Conservatives in general believe that public good provision is in the set of things that government should do well…
Breaking public goods into individual transactions isn’t, in general, the best way to provide them…w/public good being used in its economic sense here, not to mean “anything that it might be good for the public to have”.

I think it’s easy enough to understand why liberals would feel discomfort at the idea of tolls (although they’re wrong). The idea sounds an awful lot like “I pay for mine, you pay for yours. We’re all individuals.” In a proximate sense this is exactly how the system works for the road in question, but believing in tolls does not commit one to the belief that people don’t have a universal right to certain basic access to sustenance. I would go so far as to say that as a progressive, I believe in a universal right to transportation–with cars as part of that mix. I do not however, either as a progressive or as someone who respects the power of markets to rationalize the distribution of goods, believe that we have a universal right to cars.

Adam Smith referred to the diamond-water paradox. This is the idea that something like a diamond, with virtually no practical uses (Okay, well, some…) is precious, while something as life-affirming as water can cost next to nothing. I think a road in some sense can be understood through this lens. Though not as precious a thing as water, roads are desperately needed for the functioning of an economy, yet despite their intrinsic value they are judged by most of us to be free.

Water is actually a good example to start with. We should have a universal right to water. A person needs a gallon of it each day to drink, and several gallons more each for sanitation, cooking, and so forth respectively. As a progressive, one should commit oneself to the idea that it is wrong for any person, no matter what their faults, to do without such a basic thing. But when we give away millions of gallons of the stuff to farms as a supplement to agriculture, it’s not the same thing. This goes beyond providing the basic needs of every individual towards a more blanket subsidization of a private interest. Such a subsidy has serious consequences on the market efficiency of our agricultural system. It distorts any self regulation of environmental impact due to water usage that might be expected to happen from cost. And it’s unfair: a farmer who does not receive this subsidy will be at a disadvantage to one who does, making this type of subsidized farmer a special protected class that sits outside of the normal realities for others in his/her industry.

Healthcare is another example. I believe that progressives are wrong to expend so much effort defending the flawed Affordable Care Act, because from my perspective it’s basically a bail-out of the insurance industry. There are beneficiaries on the other side (I’ll be one). But to quote the late John Kenneth Galbraith, one does not feed the birds first by passing the oats through a horse. I’d go a bit further than Galbraith. His criticism was that we shouldn’t use a private entity to provide a public good. I would universalize his statement. We shouldn’t argue for a policy because it has secondary or tertiary beneficiaries if the structure of the program is inefficient at providing those benefits. A free market or a single payer system both have advantages for provision of healthcare. The ACA essentially takes away the benefit of either.

If you assume that just as one has a basic need for water, one also has a basic need for transportation, then naturally you will follow that conclusion correctly to the result that government should have some collective role in providing for this need. Yet, just as in the case of water, while one has an overall right to access, that does not grant one the right to be given more than the basics. We should laugh at a policy of taxing everyone for highways and then leaving them free at the source of use just as we would laugh at a policy to tax everyone equally to provide the “public need” of a Mercedes for every household, or to “provide for public housing” by buying a Newport Mansion for every household (Okay, I suppose in the case of Alex & Ani, that’s exactly what we did, but I digress).

Markets have a place in our decision-making about roads, because like every other thing under the sun, roads have a cost and a benefit. Too often, progressives and conservatives alike talk about their respective programs as if the money rains from On High without coming from someplace. Take this Atlantic Monthly article excoriating Chris Christie for his transportation policies as an example from the left. Overall I agree with it, but then there’s this passage:

A staggering 400,000 people make the trip from New Jersey to New York each day by car, train, bus, and ferry, the most that commute between any two states. That exhausting journey gets messed up any time a choke point gets blocked (say, by a power problem in the Amtrak tunnel, or, in this case, the closing of several toll lanes in Fort Lee). For the typical Jersey commuter, it’s a rare week that passes without a glitch.

The ARC tunnel had been designed to relieve some of the enormous pressure on the few bridge and tunnel crossings between New York and New Jersey, where demand is expected to rise nearly 40 percent by 2030. The tunnel had bipartisan support from state lawmakers, and former Governor Jon Corzine, a Democrat, broke ground on the project in 2009 to much fanfare. Construction was already well underway on ARC, the biggest public works endeavor in the nation’s history, when Christie pulled the plug.

The federal government had committed to pay for 51 percent of the project, which had estimated costs in the neighborhood of $10 billion. Then-Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, Ray LaHood, made a personal trip to New Jersey to plead with Christie to reconsider his stance.

But Christie stood firm, winning kudos from Republicans across the nation as a tough-minded conservative who was willing to make difficult choices about reining in government spending. It was his breakout appearance on the national scene, and a lot of people liked what they saw.

Two years after Christie killed ARC, a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office came out that suggested what he had said about the cost of the tunnel was wrong. Among other things, the report found that he had dramatically overstated the share that New Jersey would have had to pay. Christie had claimed that the state would be responsible for 70 percent of the ARC costs, while the GAO found that number would have been 14.4 percent. The state ended up having to repay $95 million to the federal government in a negotiated settlement. (my emphases)

This is the kind of statement you see on left and right all the time: an accounting of costs that talks about “how much the state will pay” after the feds throw in their share, as if the federal part of the expenditure doesn’t matter. I fully agree that this was a project that was well worth its cost, but this is just bad accounting. The people of New Jersey are not just taxpayers in New Jersey. They also pay federal taxes. If a project is good on its own merits, then so be it. But if we’re arguing that it’s good because someone else is supposedly paying for it, we’re fooling ourselves (You can count on conservatives like John Kasich of Ohio to make the same type of ridiculous argument in defense of a project like the so-called Opportunity Corridor in Cleveland, so it’s a bipartisan disease).

If local and state governments thought about road projects in terms of the costs they carried, as well as the benefits, then the way we approached roads would be very different. Chuck Marohn of The Strong Towns blog makes this argument forcefully every week on his podcast. An engineer, Marohn was drawn to express himself on planning by what he observed on the job. He found that time and again, cities and towns allowed sprawl to be built for the benefit of the jobs, tax revenue, or outside grants that it would draw in its first iteration, without considering the long-term cost of maintaining the expensive infrastructure when it wore out. By building towns on large lots, one story high, with wide expanses of road, plumbing, and electrical connections connecting them at a distance, Marohn argues that the fantastic appearance of growth belies the fact that there isn’t enough revenue to cover long term costs. This has obvious importance to progressives concerned about land use policy and “alternative” transportation, but it’s fundamentally an example of where the basic mechanism of the market has been distorted by outside government interference.

Road pricing can be used to sustain the long-term costs of a project, like the Sekonnet Bridge, not only from a supply but a demand side. People’s peak demand for a “free” service is always higher than if they had to pay its costs. Jarrett Walker of Human Transit describes this as being like the people who sleep out in tents all night to get free tickets to a concert. The campers are paying in time what they might pay in money. This is what happens to people on a clogged road. The “free” (actually subsidized) use of the road has no check on people’s use of it, so that people pay in time during their commute for what they might have paid for in money.

Road pricing is only part of the externality of driving. Parking is among the most expensive aspects of a trip for most people, outweighing gas expenditures for the trips we make everyday (because so many of those–the commute to work, the trip to the grocery store, picking the kids up from soccer practice, are relatively short). We have a range of zoning requirements that force developers to create excess parking spots to meet a Christmas Eve peak demand, with the base assumption being that such parking spots are free (in reality, they average around $15,000 per space).

While making car users pay for the things they use, like road space or parking, has been portrayed by many so-called conservatives as “taxing”, in reality what is happening is that the users of a product do not pay for it at the point of consumption. Since most Americans drive to work, this might seem untroubling–after all, if we paid for these things up front, wouldn’t it mostly pan out the same way that it does if we did secretly through taxes? The error in this assumption is that the arrangement of our buildings, the distances we choose to travel, the methods we would use when we do travel, and so on are all static phenomena. The tragedy of the commons in this case is that the few people who try to break against the tide and ride a bicycle or take a bus someplace are left high and dry with no real infrastructure to support them, despite the fact that their way of getting somewhere is inherently more market-based and efficient.

What’s far more precious than a diamond is our ability to survive and thrive on this planet. But if we’re going to overcome the devastating effects of climate change, we need to address the market distortions in our transportation and land use.

It’s sound conservative policy.

~~~~

August 19, 2013August 20, 2013

With tolls, tea party got the government they demanded

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When I was a cub reporter I subsidized my habit of writing for the Jamestown Press by working as an arborist on Aquidneck Island. To do so, I had to pay a lot of tolls going over the Newport Bridge. And not the ten cent kind like those crossing over the brand new Sakonnet River Bridge this morning. To get to Newport back then it was shell out 10 bucks for 11 tokens or pay 2 bucks each way.

So I can certainly sympathize with the folks who live in Tiverton and Little Compton – as well as Fall River and Westport – and need to get to Aquidneck Island, or vice versa. It adds up, I know. (On some days I would toss as many as six tokens in that blight at the bottom of the bridge!)

In political theory, too, I support this cause. Bridges, like buses, have a value to users and non-users alike and – in a perfect progressive world – both should be paid for communally through taxes not user fees.

But paying for anything, especially something as expensive as a bridge over Narragansett Bay, with such a simple solution is not so easy in Rhode Island in no small part because of the same conservatives fighting against the tolls.

Justin Katz, one of the most outspoken Tivertonians on tolling, says the expense should be borne by taxpayers. Meanwhile, his day job is to advocate against taxes. WPRO made the Providence Journal last week when fictional small government hero John Galt call into the Matt Allen Show to advocate against tolls. The yellow “don’t tread on me” snake shirt that graced yesterday’s protest is an iconic emblem of the tea party movement.

WPRO, Allen, Katz and the tea party are among the most vocal critics of government spending in Rhode Island politics. It stinks that people have to pay a user fee to cross the Sakonnet River Bridge but it stinks because of what small government and austerity actually look like when not fictionalized in novel or talk radio or blog post.

This isn’t big government sticking it to John Galt, Matt Allen and Justin Katz. This is what small government looks like.

The whole thing reminds me of the HL Mencken quote: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Picture of old Newport Bridge token:

July 4, 2013July 4, 2013

Why the Sakonnet River Bridge tolls matter

It’s not often that I disagree with Bob Plain, but I think he underestimates the importance of the battle over the Sakonnet River Bridge tolls.

There are three important things going on here:
First, as progressives, we should oppose tolls as a matter of principle. Because everybody pays the same rate no matter how much you make, tolls are one of the most regressive taxes out there, hitting those who can least afford to pay the hardest. They also waste a ton of time. By sending people way out of their way to avoid them, tolls waste a lot of gas, which is bad for the environment. Unlike income taxes, they do do serious damage to the economy. Oh, and they’re quite expensive to collect. Ending the income tax cuts for the rich makes more sense. Even raising regressive property and sales taxes makes more sense.

Secondly, this is yet another example of House leadership breaking promises. After having put in a compromise on the tolls to secure the East Bay representatives’ votes on the budget–votes necessary for the budget’s passage–Fox changed course and added the 10-cent toll. Although just the latest example of House leadership going back on its word, this time it put real fury on the floor. That night, the ranks of the anti-Fox caucus swelled considerably.

If leadership keeps this up, progressives should have the votes to block another right-wing budget come this time next year.

Finally, and most importantly, this battle is about how we plan on paying for the delayed maintenance on our infrastructure. Traditionally, infrastructure is funded through bonds, but for reasons that remain unclear to me, we have decided not to fully fund maintenance when we do our infrastructure bonds. As a result, we have to spend quite a bit more money replacing bridges. The obvious thing to do would be to do a simple deferred maintenance bond and start a practice of pre-funding maintenance in the original infrastructure bond issues. Because the Fed has given us a one-time opportunity to borrow at very low interest rates–and because deferring maintenance usually winds up costing more later–we are wasting tons of taxpayer money by not floating a huge infrastructure maintenance bond before interest rates rise. That’s before you even get into all the jobs an infrastructure bond would create. (I know Keynesianism is a hard sell on Smith Hill, but that doesn’t make it any less correct.)

But that’s not what the General Assembly is planning on doing. In her floor speech on the tolls, conservative Senate President Paiva-Weed did not mince her words about where the right-wing leadership is heading on this issue. “The fact is, we need to start looking at user fees,” she declared. Translation: Instead of taking advantage of a free lunch on maintenance bonds, we will be funding repairs on the backs of those who can least afford to pay.

So no, the toll battle is not a bunch of meaningless whining about ten cents. It is about progressive taxation, it is about a breach of trust, and it is about Keynes.