Our roads need to be fixed

Odd how the mind works.

Make the trip down to the city on I-35 in my pickup and you’re forced to endure a stretch of concrete that needs to be replaced. Not fixed with yet another decking of asphalt, but torn out and replaced. Totally.

It’s not just the wallow that the big rigs rut into asphalt surfaces. It’s comparatively new concrete already buckling so that a pickup, depending upon its wheelbase, begins lurching up and down into a rhythm that resembles a small boat lifted and tossed by the waves.

What I’m trying to describe actually doesn’t last that long. But the effect that stretch of highway has on my quad-cab pickup does crescendo enough to make one wonder if you’re ever going to get there. When traffic forces me to remain in the lane, the effect is hypnotic. My mind is lulled into the relentless chant “I think I can, I think I can…” which eventually morphs into a more sinister “You get what you pay for… you get what you pay for… You get what you pay for….”

Yes, it’s odd how the mind works.

There’s no pleasant way to discuss this. Missouri’s transportation system needs more money. Notice the focus on a stretch of interstate which may attract the attention of many. How much more is the need to fix and maintain the crumbling blacktops and bridges in our rural, less populated areas. The neglect for proper financing is serious.

This means taxes.

There’s something to be said about Julie Andrews singing, “A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down…” But there’s hardly anything sweet about paying more taxes.

Later, on that same trip to the city, I found myself sitting in a rather huge parking lot, waiting on my wife. The engine was idling to keep the heater going strong. I looked down at the gas gauge, wondering if that habit would change if we voted to substantially increase the gas tax. Then I looked up to ponder something perhaps few others noticed.

There sat a car tethered to an electrical device. The parking spot was actually a charging station. Evidently, the car’s owner was getting a charge using a credit card buying stuff inside the store while the car was getting its charge just sitting there waiting. Like me. This got me thinking: What’s fair about a fuel tax with electric vehicles increasingly in the mix?

There is no perfect solution, of course. A higher gas tax always hits the poor and those on fixed incomes unfairly. High-mileage vehicles provide less revenue for road maintenance every year. Who knows what the impact of automatic “driver-free” vehicles in the future will be? Yet, at least for now, funding highways and bridge projects with a fuel tax still makes the most sense.

I like the idea where users pay the costs; I particularly like the fuel tax dollars that out-of-state drivers contribute.

Tolls, vehicle registration fees, general fund spending — all deserve study. And now, I suppose, considering transportation taxes based on each vehicle’s odometer readings deserves study. That, at least, suggests one way to have electric cars pay a share of the tax burden.

But certainly, in the foreseeable future, no revenue source provides as much money as quickly as a gas tax.

Recently, a bipartisan task force recommended a 10-cent-per-gallon increase in the state’s gas tax. Diesel fuel would be taxed an additional 12 cents. The experts say this will generate an additional $430 million annually for road and bridge repair and upgrades — a little more than half of what the experts recognize as our real need. They estimate that a 10-cent gas increase will cost us an additional $78 a year if you fill up about once a week.

A 10-cent gas tax increase isn’t enough medicine to cure all our transportation ills. And,

no, don’t count me among those singing for  “A spoon full of sugar (to) help the medicine go down.” The politicians like to sugarcoat tax proposals.

Too often the “sugar” involves new construction promises. For us out here in the tundra of the prairies, that always seems to mean the money goes where city traffic flows. Besides, new construction is such a treadmill — expanding our transportation system while perpetually unable (or unwilling) to take care of what we’ve got.

Phasing in a tax increase is another sweetener. Legislators know it’s tough getting re-elected when taxes increase. But phasing in a gas tax — say a nickel every five years — just kicks maintenance problems down the road. And borrowing isn’t the answer. I read where Missouri already pays $280 million a year in interest on road bonds issued in previous years.

So, it makes sense to let voters decide. That may happen this November. And before you settle into an opinion, please keep these few facts in mind: Missouri’s current gas tax (17-cents a gallon) was set in 1996. It now ranks 47th in the nation. Because of inflation, it provides less than half the purchasing power it did in the mid-1990s.

The medicine is not all that expensive. We don’t need a spoon full of sugar. We need our roads to be fixed.