Our View

Our View

Legislators chasing their own tails over highway funding

A couple of state lawmakers are still whining about why they couldn’t get anything done about road funding, and are painting a grim picture of road death, bridges collapsing and major accidents, a typical political fear factor response to a clear lack of leadership.

Bowing to pressures from lobby groups, bureaucrats and government agency politics as well as voter reprisal, lawmakers have refused to consider transferring state general tax revenue from vehiclerelated items to highways that would have generated $35 million in the initial year and a whopping $548 million once fully implemented.

Rather than going up against governmental resistance, some lawmakers have suggested to simply slap a 6.5 percent sales tax on wholesale fuel prices that would have made consumer fuel prices the highest of any surrounding state. Fearing political repercussions such an attempt has been temporarily shelved.

The idea now is to propose a voter initiative coupled with a clever sales pitch to include fear factor elements to convince naive constituents that if they fail to pass a road tax on themselves they may die crossing a collapsing bridge or overpass.

If that were to succeed these politicians would be able to skirt voter reprisal and also appease government bureaucrats and lobbyist by keeping their hands off their precious budgets.

One of the main political instigators in all this is Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, who failed to get House approval during the last session of the Arkansas Legislature asking voters for a bond issue funded by this enormous sales tax increase on fuel prices.

It was two years ago, Douglas withdrew his bill to gradually transfer state general tax revenue from vehicle-related items to highways for reasons we believe was at the request of Gov. Asa Hutchinson who at the time was organizing his special highway funding committee similar to the one former Gov.

Mike Beebe had when he was governor.

During a recent panel discussion among eight lawmakers at the Arkansas Economic Development commission’s Arkansas Rural Development Conference Douglas made it clear he is still hell bent on snowballing voters and convincing them to tax themselves for the sake of their own “highway safety”.

His comment that “when we start having bridges collapses and people killed, then we’ll start funding highways,” sounds to us like a threat. In other words, let the politicians sit back on their holierthan- thou duffs and do nothing, let the roads crumble, the bridges fall apart and force voters to deal with the crisis by making them tax themselves.

What this boils down to is a lack of leadership, playing political games, a lack of intestinal fortitude and a failure to make the necessary budgetary adjustments that can solve the problem without additional and unnecessary taxation.