RALEIGH – I have never met any local official who says that transportation funding in North Carolina is fair and equitable.
Each argument is different, but the common denominator is a plaintiff cry for “our share.” Talk to folks in rural areas, and they say that a stagnant economy and outflow of young people to the cities prove the need for more and better roads to lure new economic prospects. Talk to folks in urban areas, and they say that a surging economy and inflow of young people prove the need for more and better roads to keep up with demand.
Yes, a lack of traffic justifies road building in the country. Too much traffic justifies road building in the city.
So is there a middle category of communities that are adequately served, a sort of asphalt-paved Goldilocks land? Of course not. Probe deeper, and you find more specific complaints. Fast-growing suburban counties such as Union and Johnston say their needs are overlooked. Some rural counties are growing, perhaps losing young people but gaining plenty of not-so-young retirees, and naturally this means their infrastructure is inadequate.
In the East, both healthy resort towns on the coast and troubled inland communities say that their region’s interests have been sacrificed to those of big cities and the Piedmont. In the west, both healthy resorts in the mountains and declining mill towns in the valleys say their region barely registers on Raleigh’s radar screen.
Charlotte says that envy and distance keep it from obtaining its “fair share.” Fayetteville recently muscled its way into the queue for urban-loop money, while Wilmington is pushing for tolls to build its “Skyway” loop and Winston-Salem feels left out and ignored. The Triad feels passed over when competing with faster-growing Charlotte and the Triangle. And so on.
The John Locke Foundation has studied the issue of highway funding in several different ways over the years. We discovered that the time period being analyzed can have a big effect on the statistics, and thus on conclusions about whether one region or another is getting the best or worst deal.
That doesn’t mean that I haven’t drawn some conclusions. First, as much as possible it makes sense to re-invest highway dollars back into the communities where they are collected, rather than attempt to redistribute them across the state in ways that will never be satisfactory in a political sense or efficacious in an economic sense. In general, you cannot make a stagnant community into a burgeoning one by building a road.
Second, the real problem is that there isn’t enough revenue flowing through the system to fund legitimate highway needs, regardless of where they are. This is partly due to the fact that low-priority projects continue to get funding for political reasons that would never pass a rational test. It is also related to the fact that, because of higher fuel efficiency, gas-tax revenues per passenger mile are lower than projected, even at the higher tax rate enacted in 1989.
On that latter point, it would help if North Carolina stopped diverting hundreds of millions of highway-related revenues, from taxes on gas and cars, to non-highway purposes. The John Locke Foundation’s new Freedom Budget 2005 would end this, putting a lot more money into annual highway investment without raising taxes. The state should also continue moving forward with toll-funded projects, which have the virtue of more closely connecting usage and payment.
We’d take a big step forward on all this if local politicians would stop seeing the problem as primarily one of lobbying for larger slices of the pizza. What’s needed is a bigger pie, and less of the good stuff slopping off the side before it’s served.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.