Think Regional/Act Local

Last week, I was invited by the city manager of Sterling Heights to make a presentation at their city council meeting about transportation funding. It seems that they were getting questions from citizens as to why the city wasn’t doing more work to improve the conditions of roads and bridges in the city and did not understand that funding was decreasing.

I went to the meeting and did my best to explain the situation. I call it Funding 101. I am always reminded as I do these presentations that many people do not understand that transportation funding is really based on how many gallons of gasoline we buy and on the value of their automobile. It is really just that simple. When we buy more fuel efficient cars and fewer gallons of gasoline, there are fewer dollars to improve our road and transit systems. Great for us as consumers, great for the environment, but really bad if it is your only source of revenue! Many people believe that some combination of property tax, sales tax, and other taxes they pay go to improve roads and public transit. Unless you are in a community that has a specific road tax or voted in favor of the SMART millage, the answer is no.

The City of Sterling Heights put my presentation on their web site and I promised to respond to any questions they may receive. If you are interested in learning more about the basics of transportation funding, the link below will take you there. After you have seen this presentation, I would be happy to respond to any questions you may have.

Presentation to Sterling Height City Council (External link) 

Before we can fix something we have to understand how it works. Hopefully this presentation will help you understand the basics.

Michigan’s roads continue to deteriorate at an increasingly rapid rate, according to the Michigan Transportation Asset Management Council after reviewing the 2010 pavement condition data. This is not news to anyone who drives or is a passenger in a car. What is news though is the extent of the problem and the fact that the data tells us we haven’t yet hit rock bottom! The time series data shows that one out of every three miles of road on the federal-aid-eligible system is now in poor condition. What is worse is that there is no evidence that this trend is going to reverse itself; in fact, the council projects that the situation will only get worse in the coming years.

Allowing this trend to continue will have significant financial and economic consequences. For example, the cost of returning a poor road to good condition is four-to-five times greater than the cost of maintaining a road in fair condition. Allowing more roads to reach poor condition will dramatically increase the costs of repairing Michigan’s road network and take much longer to achieve.

What is even more disturbing is the information from the figure above. In 2004, 13.6 percent of the lane miles of the federal-aid-eligible system were identified as needing structural improvement. By 2010, that number had more than doubled to 35 percent. In 2004, nearly 88 percent of the federal-aid system was considered in good or fair shape. By 2010, that figure fell to 65 percent. Clearly, the overall condition of the federal-aid system is getting significantly worse with more miles in poor condition than in good condition.

Governor Snyder is big on “dashboards” as a way of tracking improvement over time. This measure of pavement condition is going in the wrong direction. It is time to rally the troops, pick an improvement goal, find the needed dollars, and make it happen!

Last week, local elections were held in many parts of the state. Among other things, people were asked to support increases in transit funding in five of the elections – and the millage increases passed in every case!

Three of the votes—in Benzie County, Kalkaska County, and the Holland area—won by 3-to-1 margins; the fourth, in Grand Haven Township, won by a 2-to-1 margin. The fifth, in the Grand Rapids area, was very close, winning by a margin of just 126 votes.

The vote in the Grand Rapids area is also interesting. Voters there approved a millage renewal and a 0.35 mil increase, for a total levy of 1.47 mils for transportation. The revenue will fund the first bus rapid transit project in Michigan linking downtown Grand Rapids to Gaines Township. A previous vote had failed.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of state lawmakers considering further cutting already insufficient state funding of public transit. People seem to think transit is important to the point of increasing their own local contribution – at least in these five communities. But, this follows a pattern that we saw in the last general election, when many of the millage increases for both transit and road funding were approved by the voters.

So, are state lawmakers really voting for what their constituents want or are they voting their own personal convictions? I wonder how people will react to the potential situation where they vote to increase spending for transit and the legislature votes to cut spending for public transit? The lack of an increase in funding for needed road and transit projects grows more desperate all the time. Throw in the likely scenario of the federal government also cutting highway and transit funding and it is even worse.

So, what does this mean? Seems like the people in these five communities are more focused on the outcomes – on the need for and the quality of the service than the extra money that would be coming out of their pocket. Isn’t it time we all were?

The United States Conference of Mayors recently released week a 176-city survey focused on metropolitan transportation investments. There should be no surprises at the results of this survey. Mayors feel that the federal government should focus future transportation infrastructure investments on addressing the growing needs of metropolitan areas.

Metropolitan areas account for 86 percent of employment, 90 percent of wage income, and over the next 20 years, 94 percent of the nation’s projected economic growth. However, these areas also have the nation’s worst traffic jams, its oldest roads and bridges, and inadequate transit systems at capacity. Many of these needs are not being addressed as quickly as they need to be. In addition the survey indicates:

• Ninety-eight percent of the mayors polled identify increased investment in affordable, reliable transportation as an important part of their cities’ economic recovery and growth.
• Ninety-three percent of mayors want to see that cities and their metropolitan areas receive federal funds directly.
• Only seven percent indicate support to increase the federal gas tax – unless funding is directly going to cities and regions
• Eighty percent indicate that highway expansion should be a low priority.

The entire results of the survey can be found at usmayors.org/transportationsurvey 

What a surprise – the mayors want direct funding to address the very real problems currently existing in the metropolitan areas of our country. I agree that more dollars need to be spent on addressing our crumbling pavements and bridges in the urban areas, although there are still places where we need to invest to address congestion. I believe that transit systems in the urban areas need to be expanded and become more reliable, but increased transit is also important in the rural areas of our region and around the country. I believe that increased funding is important – regardless of whether the dollars go directly to cities or through the existing process. We need help everywhere.

What we are all forgetting here, in my opinion, is the most important thing of all. We need to get on the same page. We all need to agree on a direction and then work together to secure the dollars to get us there. We need to set priorities after a thorough process and then all get behind them to make things happen. If we do this there is a much better chance of funds being spent to address our very real infrastructure needs, including the very real issues cited by the mayors’ report, instead of funding projects of lesser importance. Changing the forum for decision making from one group to another is not going to guarantee success – only working together will.