After Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves failed to get through the Senate a rewrite of Mississippi’s education funding formula, the pressure is on the term-limited incumbent with gubernatorial aspirations to get some signature proposal enacted this year.
Next in line would be Reeves’ “pain-free” proposal for fixing the state’s deteriorating roads and bridges.
It’s “pain-free” because the Republican claims he can come up with $200 million a year — which, incidentally, is only about half what reputable estimates have said it will take to repair and replace what’s crumbling — without a tax increase.
Instead of recommending doing the obvious — raise a fuel tax that hasn’t been adjusted in more than 30 years — Reeves is basing his revenue plan on a hope and a prayer. He thinks the state’s going to be doing so well economically over the next few years that it’s not going to need to set aside any new money for its rainy day fund and can instead divert that revenue to transportation infrastructure. He also expects sales tax collections will rise enough that the state can afford to more generously share that revenue with local governments for their road and bridge needs.
Those provisions, and plenty of others in Reeves’ proposal, have caused Mike Tagert, the Northern District’s transportation commissioner, to conclude that what the lieutenant governor has proposed is mostly for show.
“It provides a facade that we are doing something when truly we’re not,” said Tagert.
Tagert, one of three Republicans on the all-GOP Transportation Commission, said that Reeves’ proposal is shot through with bad policy.
It starts with an inconsistent, unreliable source of funding, which would most likely drive up the costs of construction as projects run into delays when state revenues turn down.
Then there’s the new layer of bureaucracy that Reeves wants to create by shifting some of the decisions about roads and bridges from the Transportation Commission to the Governor’s Office — a place that Reeves expects to occupy about the time that his proposal would fully kick in.
The bill would create, said Tagert, “several little slush funds” for the governor to control. It already telegraphs what parts of the state would likely be the main beneficiaries if Reeves has any say over how the money is spent. Out of $240 million in bond money included in the bill, $47 million, or one-fifth of the total, would be earmarked for transportation projects in Madison, Rankin, DeSoto and Lamar counties — four heavily populated, heavily Republican counties that gave Reeves large majorities over his Democratic opponent in the last statewide election.
Tagert argues, as I have repeatedly, that the most reliable, straightforward and logical way to raise the money needed to make serious headway in replacing dangerous bridges and repairing bone-jarring roads is by raising the state’s fuel tax. He also wants to peg future increases in the fuel tax to a construction cost index so that this political battle doesn’t have to be fought every 20 or 30 years.
I could not, however, pin Tagert down on a number to which he’d say the fuel tax should be raised immediately. He points out that every 1-cent hike raises about $22 million annually, so 9 additional cents a gallon would produce the $200 million that Reeves claims his no-tax-hike plan would generate. But Tagert wouldn’t say whether he would recommend a number more or less ambitious than that.
Nine cents would be a start, but it’s not enough. Just adjusting for inflation since the fuel tax was last increased in 1987, the increase should be more like 24 cents. You’d be hard-pressed, though, to find any Republican elected official, even those who can do the math and recognize the decline in the state’s transportation infrastructure, come anywhere close to that number for fear that it would put them out of office in the next election.
At least they’re not lining up in lockstep behind Reeves.
When the new education funding formula got shot down last week, he blamed it mostly on the Democratic opposition, which voted unanimously to kill the measure. The lieutenant governor tried to skirt over the fact that he couldn’t persuade more than a third of the senators from his own party to vote his way.
Reeves is not just being bucked in his own chamber. As Tagert and other GOP members on the Transportation Commission have demonstrated, there are several Republicans throughout state government who don’t agree with Reeves and are willing to speak up about it.
