CA: War for road funding escalates

The Reporter - Vacaville ^ | 7/4/05 | Steve Geissinger - Oakland Tribune

[NormsRevenge]

The escalating civil war over scarce transportation funds in California isn't just north vs. south. Now the battle is urban vs. rural on all matters - from gridlock to pavement repair.

With the Schwarzenegger administration, state Legislature and Washington all battling over the hot-button issue of scarce transportation funding, a group of non-government experts has huddled to figure proper money distribution, given myriad political and technical variables.

What they found was that everyone had pretty good arguments for a greater share of the funds.

The independent re-searchers wound up calling for more road money to solve the problem, hardly a new solution in the rhetoric of politicians or the minds of Californians.

"Both rural and urban counties offer valid claims they are not allocated their share of transportation tax funds," says Adrian Fleissig, an economist at California State University, Fullerton.

The conclusion of the report, commissioned by the Center for California Studies in Sacramento, dumped the conflict back into the gurgling tar pit of state capital politics, where the lesser populated Northern California is clearly disadvantaged.

"The north gets shafted," said Tim Hodson, a political science professor at California State University, Sacramento, noting that the last time a statewide office was won by someone based north of Sacramento was 1958.

Northern California lacks the popu-lation, and therefore the representatives in the Legislature, to overcome dominant urban lawmakers. And the governor comes from Hollywood.

In the May revision of his proposed 2005-06 budget, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger restored $1.3 billion in road funds that had been borrowed to offset California's deficit woes.

"For too long, California has neglected its transportation needs," Gov. Schwarzenegger said. "When the people passed Proposition 42 (in 2002) they made it clear that gasoline taxes should be spent on transportation.

"Now, for the first time since its passage, Proposition 42 will be fully funded and $1.3 billion of sorely needed funding will go toward repairing our roads, expanding our highways, building better and safer bridges and creating new carpool lanes."

The ranking Republican on the Assembly Budget Committee, Rick Keene of Chico, praised the governor for "using one-time revenue for one-time projects such as building roads" while rejecting Democrats' calls for tax hikes.

But majority Democrats in the Legislature said all the governor really did was back off his plan to again use a loophole in Proposition 42 to raid transportation funds, hoping to buoy sagging popularity poll numbers before the 2006 elections.

They point out he still owes the Proposition 42 coffer more than $2 billion from previous borrowing.

"We will need more than one year's worth of Proposition 42 funding to address our transportation needs," said Assemblywoman Jenny Oropeza, a

Carson Democrat who chairs the Assembly Transportation Committee.

Majority Democrats in the Legislature say their version of a proposed budget also fully funds Proposition 42.

However, of the proposed $1.3 billion roads allocation in the coming fiscal year, under the Proposition 42 formula, only $127 million would go to counties and a matching amount to cities to address deferred road maintenance statewide.

Most of the rest would be pumped into urban needs, through a complicated bureaucratic process overseen by the California Transportation Commission.

California is home to five of 10 of the nation's most costly urban driving areas, due to inadequately maintained roads. The latest report by TRIP, a nonprofit national transportation research group, ranks Los Angeles No. 4 and the San Francisco Bay Area No. 5.

"Driving on rough roads takes its toll on drivers' wallets," says Michael Lawson, executive director of Transportation California, a coalition of business and labor groups. "And delaying fixing a poor road - by even a few years - can increase the road repair cost as much as 400 percent." Los Angeles and the Bay Area have the worst traffic congestion in the nation, as well.

At the same time, a new study by the Public Policy Institute of California shows California's spending per capita on transportation is 29 percent below the national average.

Part of the problem lies in Washington with federal highway allocations.

U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are touting recent upper house passage of a transportation bill that would boost California's share of return for highway funding to 91 percent next year and to 92 percent by 2009.

"California is a super-donor state," said Feinstein. "For every dollar California sends to the federal highway trust fund, it gets back only 90.5 cents. Congress needs to do much more to

balance these books. At least this bill provides a start." But the Senate's highway bill is $11 billion more than the $284 billion plan approved by the House - and the amount that President Bush has said he would support.

Another wild card in both state and federal road funding is posed by the multibillion-dollar cost overruns on work to make the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge safer in earthquakes.

Initially, Schwarzenegger wanted Bay Area motorists to largely cover the costs while the region's Democratic lawmakers asked for a statewide bond.

Last week, Schwarzenegger and Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, said they agreed on a compromise that would raise tolls on all bridges in the Bay Area, with the exception of the Golden Gate, but would keep the region's preferred, more expensive design.

The toll hike would generate about 60 percent of the project's $3.6 billion cost overrun. The state would contribute an additional $630 million from its transportation fund, and an additional $820 million would be raised by refinancing old debt.

The agreement must be approved by the Legislature. Politics aside, some analysts say the bridge should be funded by a bond.

"Bridges are classic capital improvement projects and traditionally such things are funded by bonds repaid by tolls and taxes," Hodson said. "We may be selling bonds to finance everything, but bridges are one of the few things that should be funded that way."

While the controversy over bridge cost overruns has complicated the debate over California's transportation funding in general, it has also triggered allegations from stakeholders that the state Department of Transportation is an agency in disarray. Some analysts say the assertion, in itself, has hampered the agency's efficiency.

The complexities of the clash over road funding are only increasing, according to the Center for California Studies report. Factors now include increased pavement damage caused by types of traffic congestion and factors responsible for the harm such as adverse weather conditions and heavier trucks.

"Since rural counties have a larger share of roads to maintain and receive less funding, it may be argued that they subsidize urban counties' pavement maintenance," the study stated.

"However, urban counties generate most of the transportation tax revenue because the majority of gallons of fuel are purchased in urban counties. In addition, the cost of urban pavement maintenance from increased road use may be relatively high compared to rural counties because urban counties have most of the state's registered vehicles.

"Therefore, urban counties can argue that they subsidize rural counties' pavement maintenance since they have relatively higher costs of road maintenance compared to urban counties and generate most of the transportation tax revenue."

The study concluded that the "distribution of transportation revenue significantly favors neither rural nor urban counties" and calls for increased road funding, an obvious solution analysts warn is a long shot, politically, in a deficit-stricken state.

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