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Transportation
Drive Now, Pay Later
Builder financing, private operators, more tolls: Is "borrow and spend" right for taxpayers?
Engineering failure
Overseeing all this is a state secretary of transportation who has never run anything before and has no engineering degree (the first DOT secretary without an engineering degree since Walter Revell left in 1975). Kopelousos, 37, was a senior legislative analyst for Bush’s lobbying office in Washington after a stint as senior legislative aide to the late Congresswoman Tillie Fowler of Jacksonville. She became DOT’s chief of staff in 2005. Crist calls her a “consensus builder” who “understands how to manage high-profile issues.”
In a speech at the FTBA conference in July, Kopelousos noted a “perfect storm” of challenges: The “erosion of gas tax and other public funds,” the “aging transportation network,” a “growing transportation demand that cannot be met with traditional financing” and “predictions that the federal highway trust fund is going broke” as a result of spending more than it takes in from fuel taxes.
Her list epitomizes the pattern in which politicians (usually Republicans) engineer failure in government services and then declare that we need to turn the job over to private industry. Traditional sources are “inadequate” and gas taxes have eroded because politicians have not increased them, even as everything else about driving has increased (cars, paving materials, labor rates, oil and gas, tires). Traffic has been growing by 5.4%, DOT says, while lane miles are growing just 1.4%. State and local governments make the problem worse by their ineffective management of growth. We are often assured that growth “pays for itself” and helps our economy, but where’s the money?
So the “people’s governor” is acting just like cash-strapped citizens and business: He’s endorsing “innovative financing” to put off the day of reckoning. That’s how you get less congestion without more taxes.
DOT’s communications director, Dick Kane, stresses that “there are an awful lot of safeguards” in the 2007 legislation enabling this new approach. That’s true. But we also learned from other Bush-era privatization ideas that execution of these deals can be riddled with missteps and mischief.
If done properly, though, the approach can pay off. Money spent to relieve congestion has a substantial payback — five times the investment, by one oft-cited estimate — including economic growth, efficiency in moving goods, and savings in fuel and drivers’ time. The sooner we invest, the sooner the payback begins, if the financing doesn’t eat up the savings.
Lacking any real innovation in dealing with growth, and lacking any enthusiasm for mass transit, we’ll have to settle for innovative financing.
Drive now, pay later.
