While the Arkansas Highway Commission insists that it needs voters to approve a $575 million debt issue this November for badly needed road maintenance, records show it has been anything but frugal with existing road monies. They just announced $1.8 million dollars in awards to various applicants to be used for “recreational trails.” Recipients include entities that already get plenty of taxpayer dollars, such as the state park system and public universities. But even a private bank, Southern Bancorp Capital Partners, was awarded $100,000 of taxpayer money.
Every time you fill up at the pump, you can at least take comfort that some bankers are enjoying a fine recreational trail from some of the money you are spending for gasoline. You would probably have just blown it on food for your kids, right?
The award raises several questions. Why is the state Highway Commission, funded by fuel taxes, diverting highway funds torecreational trails? Not that there is anything wrong with recreational trails, but when people pay at the pump they expect their gasoline tax money to be spent on roads, not recreational trails.
And as long as we are asking questions of our betters, how is it that the Highway Commission has so much money to hand out for nonhighway goodies? The whole political establishment in this state has been asking us lowly citizens to go to the polls Nov. 8 and vote to load $575 million in new debt on our backs because the Highway Commission just had to have all the road money for the next 15 years right now!
Don’t we have badly needed highway maintenance? Why are they taking money from gasoline taxes and giving it to private banks and state entities that already have theirown taxpayer-funded budget for non-highway uses?
One reason our roads are so badly maintained now is that in 1999 we voted for a similar debt program. Instead of letting them have the money as it comes in, we borrowed against that stream of future revenue and gave it to them all at once.
And so they spent it all at once. They spent a lot of it building new roads (almost doubling the miles in the interstate highway system).
They left too little for maintenance for the past 10 years, especially since we had to subtract out bond commission fees and interest. Now they want to do it again.
The state’s Highway Commission system is deeply flawed. Given a large pile of money all at once, commissioners have every incentive to get “their” road built before their term expires instead of maintaining existing roads. If that were the only problem in its structure, it would be bad enough. Representation on the commission is based on our state’s population patterns in the 1930s.
Think about what NWA was like back then. Since that time, our area has boomed, while the delta and the southern part of the state have been in decline. While someone from the lower delta or the southern part of the state may think this set up is fine, people from the northwest, the central and the River Valley are not getting a fair deal. This explains why the roads up here are congested, even though our fuel tax is higher than that of Missouri. I say “no more money for a broken system.” The only way to stop them in the short term is to vote “NO” on Nov. 8 to their debt plan.
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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 09/21/2011