What Would You Like to Accomplish During the
Next Legislative Session?
Tolling New Road, River Crossings
Ananth Prasad
Transportation Secretary | Florida
“The gas tax as a funding source for transportation is not sustainable. … The revenues continue to decline, but the usage (of roads) hasn’t declined. ... So the pressure is to continue to maintain the infrastructure while not having sufficient resources to meet it. … We are going to be advancing through the legislature (a proposal) for any new capacity on interstates that we add or any new major river crossing, that we look at putting a toll. ... Whatever the toll revenue generates, you’re offsetting your traditional revenues in order to get those projects built.”
Users Must Pay for Transportation
Bruce Starr
Senator | Oregon
“You have more and more vehicle miles traveled and less and less fuel purchased in order to maintain those miles. That creates a problem for legislators as they figure out how to fund transportation system and infrastructure improvements. … At the end of the day, I believe that the states will experiment with a lot of different options. … The primary principle that Oregon has come to believe is important is that we should have a user pay system so the people who use the transportation system are the ones that ought to pay for it.”
Federal Consensus Needed to Help States
Thomas McGee
Senator | Massachusetts
“We’re really at a crisis stage in terms of our ability to continue to make the investments that we need to keep our infrastructure at a point of being safe and efficient and allowing us to grow our economy. … I think we need to think a little bit outside the box and build a consensus in terms of, hopefully, at the federal level continuing to make an investment in transportation infrastructure, recognizing that those investments coming back to the states help us to improve our transportation infrastructure, but just as importantly allow us to build our economy.”
A Money and Process Problem
Janet Kavinoky
Vice president | Americans for Transportation Mobility Coalition
Executive Director,Transportation & Infrastructure, | U.S. Chamber of Commerce
“It’s a money and process problem. In many states, the inability to partner with the private sector to bring best practices to bear in project delivery, as well as finding different ways to finance projects, are going to be impediments to doing major transportation investments. The second piece that makes it hard to do these long-term bigger pieces is just a lack of clarity on the regulatory and process front. States need to make sure they are opening up every possible avenue for innovation in funding and financing and for bringing expertise from different sectors. … The second piece is engaging all levels of government in efforts to reform processes so that they actually serve the end goal.”
Break the Gridlock
Alice Hausman
Representative | Minnesota
Co-chair | CSG Transportation Task Force
“… Transportation funding has been caught up in the same gridlock that everything else is, and that is really inaction on a whole range of issues (in Congress). Obviously, the solution there is to face the fact that we need to do this and to move in a bipartisan way. Transportation in the past was always that place where we could find bipartisan compromise. … Gradually we’re coming to an understanding that our transportation solutions will require a range of solutions, so we need to not disinvest in roads and bridges, but to balance that with air travel, which we do reasonably well, rail which we do lousy, and then the whole range of public mass transit options on the local level.”
