Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves has finally offered his plan to address Mississippi’s crumbling transportation infrastructure, but it’s a half-baked one.
Reeves’ proposal seems less worried about dealing realistically with the problem of deteriorating roads and bridges than with boosting his expected run for governor next year. And if his proposal were to be enacted and he were to win the governor’s office, it would conveniently give him control of how about $200 million a year is spent on transportation infrastructure.
There are lots of problems with the Republican’s plan, including that it doesn’t produce enough money, just like earlier proposals this session from the House of Representatives. There is no way to get the amount of revenue needed to fix the problem without raising taxes, most sensibly the fuel tax that has not been adjusted in more than 30 years.
But Reeves and most of his GOP colleagues in Jackson are so averse to doing the obvious that they have painted themselves into a corner of insufficiency. Even if Reeves’ plan were to work out as he envisions, it only raises half as much money annually as it’s been estimated is needed.
Because Reeves’ plan doesn’t include an increase in the fuel tax, it counts on hope and a shell game to come up with even $200 million a year. It hopes that the long-sluggish economy will turn around sufficiently so that Mississippi won’t have to dig into its rainy day fund to make ends meet and can divert new money that would normally go there to roads and bridges. The shell game in the plan is that it diverts money from current highway funding, which is no increase at all but rather just a change in who controls how the money is spent.
The Legislature likes to criticize the Mississippi Department of Transportation, claiming that it is an arrogant and wasteful agency. But MDOT is where the engineering expertise resides to determine what gets fixed first. Moving that decision-making to the governor’s office would only further politicize the process, with Republican strongholds probably getting a better shake than more Democratic parts of the state, such as the Delta.
Although we would expect Reeves’ plan to pass the Senate by Wednesday’s deadline, it’s not likely to get quite so an amenable reception in the House. In the end, if anything gets through the Legislature this year on roads and bridges, it will be a compromise between the two chambers.
Most of what their plans have in common, besides trying to send more money to local governments for infrastructure, is to avoid a hike in the fuel tax. But there’s no realistic way to make a major dent in the problem without one. The legislative leadership can roll out as many plans as it wants, but there’s no getting away from that unavoidable conclusion.
