11.17.09
Here we go again – more of the same on transportation funding
Hank Gilbert and GOP state Sen. John Carona have forced a discussion, finally, about raising the statewide gas tax in Texas into the forefront. Gromer Jeffers, Jr. at TrailBlazers has Perry’s latest statement on the issue, Perry said state needs to “raise dollars” for roads.
At a stop in Dallas Monday, Rick Perry said that elected officials would have to find a way to “expand our ability to raise some dollars” for roads and other transportation infrastructure.
“One of the problems is that we do not have the dollars that we need to build all the transportation infrastructure needs that we have,” Perry said at the Conrad High School. “So hopefully when we come back in 2011, both the citizens and their elected officials will come to a stronger realization that we’re going to have to expand our ability to raise some dollars to build the roads so that you don’t have the strangulation in places along the 1-35 corridor.”
So what did Perry actually mean by “expand our ability to raise some dollars?
And that last question is the key. We all know there’s only two ways to pay for roads, taxes or tolls. Perry has long been vehemently against raising the gas tax, (and still is as his spokesman states). Therefore we can only assume that Perry would rather use extremely expensive tolls, instead of a modest increase in the statewide gas tax.
The TexasTrib’s Elise Hu has some video of Perry and an attack ad from the Hutchison campaign, The Transportation Funding Quagmire. Perry went on to talk about his and the legislatures lack of leadership and their inability to do what’s right and needed on this issue, via the HChron.
Perry — who has talked often of the need for more transportation funding and pushed what proved to be an unpopular plan that included a strong component of private investment in toll roads — sounded anything but supportive.
“Going to Lubbock, Texas, and telling ‘em ‘Hey we’re gonna raise your gas tax out here a dime so they can build some more roads in East Texas’ is generally not a real good political sell,” Perry said.
“So it’s there, and it’s talked about, and it’ll probably have about the same result as it has had in the last four or five years, and that’s not a very … warm welcome in the Legislature.”
The 20-cent-a-gallon state gasoline tax hasn’t been raised since 1991.
It will have been 20 years since the gas tax was raised by the time our next governor is inaugurated and the legislature is sworn in. It’s likely that any governor worth their salt, especially a GOP governor from West Texas, could go to Lubbock and make a modest increase in the gas tax palatable – if they wanted to, which is the key. Perry would much rather give our highways over to corporations than raise the gas tax a little.
Some on the right are trying to write off Gilbert and Carona as just “tax and spenders”, but that’s more GOP gibberish.
John Carona and Hank Gilbert hail from different political parties, but they have the same view on transportation: raise those taxes. They want more of our money.
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The big problem is how the money is being misspent. First, 25% is sent to public education (a constitutional diversion implemented by the public some 40 years ago). Another 20 percent is diverted by the legislature into all sorts of nice-sounding things, like the Arts Commission, DPS and the AG.
Misspent is in the eye of the beholder and spending money on education isn’t misspent money. And as always if the lege was to take that money from education they would have to make it up elsewhere or cut funding for education. So any politician that proposes that must answer, specifically, where they will cut those billions of dollars from education. The problem with diversions is similar to the education money. The legislature has been using diversions for a while for budget shenanigans, to keep from cutting budgets of other state agencies. While they should be stopped, the current leadership in the legislature doesn’t have the…guts to make the cuts to stop the diversion.
Again the discussion has come down to , as it always does, to how do you want to pay for roads? Really expensive toll roads, or with a modest increase in the gas tax? Giilbert, Carona, and Perry thus far have made their choices, few other politicians in Texas have.