Mississippians currently pay a gas tax of 37 cents per gallon. About half of that is a federal tax, half is a state tax.
The federal tax hasn’t been raised since 1993. The state tax hasn’t been raised since 1987.
Since then, miles driven per year have doubled and highway construction costs have tripled. During the same time, gas consumption, driven by fuel efficiency, has been flat. This has created a huge shortfall in our ability to maintain and expand our state’s highways.
The crows are coming home to roost. As our roads and highways crumble, politicians are having to face the horrible prospect of raising the tax on gasoline, a political nightmare. It is a test of our democratic system.
Maintaining our roads is one of the most basic obligations of our government. You would have to be an ultra libertarian not to agree that this is a legitimate governmental function. Common sense tells us it’s time to adjust the tax.
Congressional bills have been introduced to raise the federal tax 10 cents. Meanwhile, state business leaders are rallying behind a state plan to raise the tax 17 cents. Combined, that would be an extra 25 cents per gallon.
If you have an average car that gets 25 miles per gallon and drive an average amount of 12,000 miles a year, this will cost an extra $120 dollars a year. Ouch.
Here’s the good news, the average driver will save $529 in reduced vehicle maintenance costs from the smoother roads, according to experts hired by the Mississippi Economic Council (MEC), which is supporting the gas tax hike.
As a resident of Jackson, it’s hard for me to comment on the quality of our state roads. Living in the pothole capital of our state has completely warped my perspective.
That being said, I know that I have been spending at least a thousand dollars a year on bent rims, front-end alignments and various other auto costs I suspect are related to bad roads.
The MEC is an excellent organization of our state’s top business leaders. Joe Sanderson Jr., CEO of Sanderson Farms, has led the effort to suck it up, raise the tax and fix our crumbling roads.
First of all, we owe Joe Sanderson our thanks. He has donated a huge amount of his own time on this cause. As a businessman, he wants his trucks running on decent roads. As a citizen, he is doing this for the good of the state.
Joe Sanderson has built a great business. You have to be smart to do that. You also have to respect efficiency and careful allocation of resources. When a man like him leads this kind of charge, you have to respect his analysis of the situation. He says this must be done.
There are thousands of state and federal experts employed to determine the state of our roads and the appropriate annual maintenance. In addition, the MEC engaged experts at the Center for Logistics, Trade and Transportation at the University of Southern Mississippi to review the state and federal analysis. We need to believe them when they tell us the situation is dire.
It should not take a bridge collapse costing human lives to appreciate the basic concept of maintenance.
The MEC reports that 936 state bridges and 24,591 lane miles are in need of repair. There are an additional 2,989 local bridges and 13,192 local lane miles. The total cost to repair them all is an incredible $6.6 billion.
It’s the smallest roads and bridges that are in the worst shape. Those are the ones easiest for the public to ignore.
The longer you defer maintenance, the more the road crumbles and the more costly the repair. We are now facing the prospect of paying for our own collective ineptitude. Sometimes refusing to raise taxes is stupid.
The MEC is calling on inflation indexing the gas tax so we don’t screw this up again.
You can go to the MEC Web site
www.exceleratems.com for all the stats and analysis. It’s impressive.
This will be a real test of our state’s new Republican leadership. We know they can balance the budget. Good for them. But do they have the political courage to raise the gas tax to stave off infrastructure disaster? Or will they follow in the footsteps of the city of Jackson, defer maintenance and wait until the disaster is 10 times harder to repair?
If they can give away $235 million to fund “retail cultural attractions” such as the Pearl outlet mall and Madison’s Costco controversy, surely we can maintain our roads. That’s the difference between government waste and government responsibility.
I remember when the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) built its beautiful, elegant new headquarters in downtown Jackson more than a decade ago. Bad move, I thought. Terrible PR. People see lavishness and support for basic maintenance evaporates.
If the tax is raised, there will be a lot of work to do and a lot of contracts let. Out of curiosity, I searched the Mississippi code for statutes on competitive bidding of road work. As usual, I found a jumbled mess.
If we are going to spend billions on road contracts, this would also be a good time to reform our jumbled bidding rules and regulations into one easy to understand, comprehensive master statute that can’t be hidden from the public scrutiny.
