Pretend you're a Vermont legislator. You have $11 million to spend. Your choices are:
a. $11 million to dairy farmers because they're having tough economic times.
b. $11 million to repair Vermont's crumbling road and bridge infrastructure.
The legislature and governor decided to spend about $11 million -- about $8 million in "free money" they found last June when the fiscal year ended with money that hadn't been allocated and another $3 million appropriated more recently.
Yet here we read that Representative Richard Westman
is quick to produce a spreadsheet that shows that the state ought to spend $153 million more than the $400 million lawmakers and the governor are likely to agree upon in the next few weeks. ...We are falling down on providing one of the most basic services of state government
Then we read that according to the state
Agency of Transportation inspection data from 2005 showed 193 of 1,077 state-owned bridges and 260 of 1,598 town-owned bridges were structurally deficient.
That doesn't give you a very warm and fuzzy feeling about the state's ability to maintain its infrastructure. I can't wait until the state takes over Vermont's health care sector.
One would hope that a reporter covering this story would go a little deeper into the the sources of transportation infrastructure funding when she writes:
The state pays for transportation projects with revenue from fuel taxes, the tax on the purchase of vehicles, and motor vehicle fees.
But some of the gasoline tax and a portion of the sales tax on the purchase of vehicles is now dedicated to education funding. Had that money instead been used for transportation purposes, some of the highway infrastructure problems we have could be solved.
We elect our representatives to set priorities. The agriculture lobby, despite the tiny role agriculture plays in the state's economy, is very powerful. In this case, they dictated spending $11 million in a fruitless attempt to try to stem the decline in the number of dairy farms, which means that $11 million can't be used to fix the state's roads and bridges. Add that to about $30 million in transportation taxes that are used for the Education Fund and you're moving closer to the additional $153 million Rep. Westman says we need for transportation projects that benefit a majority of Vermonters. The money is there, but not the correct priorities.
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