Paying for highways - Looking for a plan

Ten years ago, there were high hopes for highways across Missouri. The Missouri Department of Transportation proposed its 15-year plan, the one that was supposed to result in massive highway improvements.

To pay for the 15-year plan, the Missouri Legislature approved a 6-cent-a-gallon increase in the state fuel tax, raising the total state tax on fuel to 17 cents a gallon. The extra tax, however, was approved with a sunset provision. Under that provision, the tax would expire in 2008 -- 15 years after the start of the 15-year plan.

Clearly, it was the legislature's intent to impose the extra fuel tax only for as long as it took to fulfill the many promises contained in the 15-year plan.

But in 1998, MoDOT discarded the 15-year plan, saying cost and revenue projections were faulty from the start. In addition, the highway department said it would require $1 billion a year in extra revenue -- on top of the revenue produced by the extra 6 cents of fuel tax -- to do everything in the 15-year plan.

How MoDOT missed these projections by so large an amount has never been satisfactorily explained. In the meantime, the department has started millions of dollars of construction projects, including many that were on the 15-year plan's list of projects.

The connection between the 15-year plan and the extra 6 cents of fuel tax ever been seriously questioned in Jefferson City. Even though the extra funding was explicitly earmarked for 15-year plan projects, no one -- elected or appointed -- was willing to make the case for dropping the extra fuel tax when the 15-year plan was shelved. Without question, losing the revenue generated by the 6 cents of fuel tax would have a devastating effect on highway programs.

To that end, state Sen. Morris Westfall of Halfway, Mo., is sponsoring a bill to remove the sunset provision on the extra 6 cents of fuel tax, even though the expiration date is still more than six years away. At the same time, Westfall is sponsoring another tax-increase bill that would generate $430 million a year for MoDOT.

There are several ways to look at what has happened with the fuel tax and what is being proposed.

One view is that the extra 6 cents should have been eliminated as soon as MoDOT announced it was abandoning the 15-year plan. Without a firm commitment to all those projects, taxpayers should have been relieved of the cost of paying for the plan.

Another view is that the legislature should have re-authorized the 6-cent fuel-tax increase to continue to fund any highway projects that were originally included in the 15-year plan. The legislature took no such action, and the tax is still being collected.

Still another view is that both the 6-cent fuel tax for highway projects and any new taxes should have some sort of sunset provisions. Rather than erasing the 2008 sunset on the 6 cents, why not extend it? And some sort of cutoff for the new taxes Westfall is proposing should be adopted.

It will be interesting to see if the legislature is any better at financing highways today than it was a decade ago.