Missouri has been under-investing in its transportation infrastructure for decades. We have especially been shorting routine maintenance – preservation, as the engineers call it – while putting too much into building new highways. The result is the highway deterioration you see all around you.

We’ve also spent money on highways to the detriment of transit. Highway building has contributed to the low population density and job dispersal that have led to public transit decline, and made transit more costly to provide. As a result, St. Louis bus service was reduced by 10 percent in October, and Kansas City bus service could see similar cuts in May.

MoDOT Director Henry Hungerbeeler has been telling the General Assembly for nearly three years that he needs $1 billion more per year to meet Missouri’s total transportation needs. Legislators have balked, preferring to point fingers at the agency for failing to make good on the “promises” of the 15-year spending proposal used in 1992 to justify a 6-cent gas tax increase. (Few legislators will acknowledge their own culpability in that fiasco.)

If there’s anything good in the current situation, it is that MoDOT now places highest priority on what they call “Taking care of what we’ve got.”

This year, legislators will once more consider several proposals to increase funding. Proposed amounts range from about $200 million to $600 million, and possible sources include higher gas taxes and other “user fees,” and a general sales tax. Funding proponents take comfort in a recent announcement from the Missouri Farm Bureau that they can now support a tax increase – provided a long list of conditions are met – but Farm Bureau support won’t be enough.

Whatever is decided, the citizens will have to approve the package at the polls. Thus, it will have to be seen as fair and equitable to urban and rural voters alike.

To make matters more interesting, there is talk of an initiative petition campaign to put a funding question before the voters in case the legislators fail to act. Signature gathering could begin early in the new year, long before anybody knows the prospects for legislative action.

The main questions are:

• How big a package? $200 million? $600 million? $1 billion? Chances are the total will be in the $500 million range.
  
•  What source of revenue? Highway proponents favor a state sales tax, but that will be strongly resisted by local governments that want to use that tax for their own local projects, as well as by social equity advocates who point to its regressive nature. The package should include significant increases in highway user fees – up to a ten-cent hike in the gas tax – before any sales tax increase for highways. Everybody benefits from highways, but we should expect to pay for that benefit directly and as part of the price of the products we buy, not as a lug on the cash value of everything we buy. (That way market forces have a better chance of reducing unnecessary transportation.)
  
• How will the money be divided among modes? Transit needs are currently estimated at $100 million per year. Back in 1992 the legislators “fully funded” a 15-year plan for highways, but they have yet to take action on a 1992 15-year plan for transit. Transit needs were estimated at $63 million per year back then. It seems only fair, then, to “fully fund” transit at that level before highways and transit and other modes line up for “second helpings.”
  
•  How will highway money be allocated between “urban” and “rural” areas? That’s a question beyond Solomon’s wisdom, so I’ll let it stand as just an issue.

Of course we should also insist that there be money to help make it safe for kids and seniors to walk along and across state roads in every city and town; increased public awareness and enforcement to improve safety by influencing driver skills and behavior; and resources to help local jurisdictions better guide their own future development so as to reduce future demands on state roads.

The Sierra Club has already made some of these points in testimony before the Senate Transportation Committee on November 28. That hearing might turn out to have been the first and best chance for transportation stakeholders to influence legislation – and especially to influence the content of a possible initiative petition.

Again, whatever happens in the next few months, the voters will have to approve it at the polls. If it’s not balanced, there will almost certainly be organized opposition to passage. The Sierra Club should be prepared to participate with other public interest organizations in such opposition, should the proposal not be balanced. Given citizens’ general aversion to tax increases, a well-reasoned opposition might be successful even though outspent 100 to 1 by funding proponents.

Let’s keep that option open. And let’s hope we don’t have to resort to it.