On Tuesday, Nov. 8, Arkansans will be asked to go to the polls and give the State Highway Commission permission to load about $575 million dollars of additional debt onto the backs of Arkansas taxpayers.
That’s about $2,000 of additional debt for each taxpaying household in the state.
We should deny them this permission. While the state does have legitimate highway needs, they can best be addressed on a pay-asyou-go basis. Handing them over $500 million dollars in one big pile simply encourages them to do what they did last time, overbuild new highway mileage at the expense of routine maintenance.
Arkansas is actually has an excessive amount of highway miles compared to other states. If building more roads was the key to more jobs, we would already have them.
Consider these statistics: Among the states, Arkansas is smaller than average in geographic size(29/50), even smaller than that in relative population, (32/50), and 34/50 in GDP.
In public road mileage however, Arkansas ranks 17th in the nation. Of the 16 states with more road miles than Arkansas, only two are anywhere near as small as Arkansas in terms of geography, population or GDP. That would be Kansas and Iowa, two states who can make a highway dollar stretch much farther than we can due to their benevolent topography and geology.
The facts are very clear.
Arkansas is not “underhighwayed” compared to other states. In fact, Arkansas taxpayers already face a burden of maintaining a volume of road miles that is far out of proportion to the resources of the state’s working families. We havelots of miles, but those miles are often built in the wrong place, leaving high growth areas with congestion. That’s likely a function of a State Highway Commission that is flawed in principle and archaic in structure (its representation is based on population patterns in 1936). If they get more money without reforming the system, then they won’t reform the system.
Also clear is the history.
When Arkansans trusted the state highway commission with a debt issuance in 1999, they used the money to almost double the number of interstate highway miles in 12 years (from 350 to 650). The system is such that commissioners are more incentivized to build new miles than they are to do maintenance. The best defense against this tendency is to allot highway money on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Another concern which has gotten too little media attention is that most of the funding for the grouppushing for the new debt “Move Arkansas Forward” comes from entities which are connected to a single individual. That individual is Madison Murphy, the multimillionaire who chairs the Highway Commission which will get to spend the money from the bond. Most of the rest of the money behind the group is from road contractors and their associations, who stand to profit from large scale new road construction.
It is my view that we should take the advice of the founders, who warned us against letting our rulers load us down with perpetual debt.
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Editor’s note: Mark Moore is the lead writer for an Internet blog on matters pertaining to Arkansas culture and government, Arkansas Watch, and on Tuesday nights is the host of an Internet-based radio program, Patriots on Watch. He can be reached through The Times at [email protected].
Opinion, Pages 4 on 09/14/2011