EYE ON TRUCKING: Rather than hike fuel taxes, lawmakers might go to Boydton and take a hike themselves

By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff

2/16/2008

The following ran as Eye on Trucking in the Perspective Section of the Feb. 1-14, 2008, issue of The Trucker.

Ah, transportation and trucking.

There’s never a dull news day.

Never a lack of fodder for a column.

The latest comes directly from Washington and Transportation Secretary Mary Peters.

Peters says she and two other members of the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission disagree with the panel’s call for up to a 40 cent increase in the federal fuel tax at least partly because they’re afraid Congress would use the money for a grand pork chop dinner rather than to rebuild the nation’s crumbling highway infrastructure.

In other words, Congress would spend the money on pet projects back home rather than figuring out a way to keep a trucker from taking four hours to get through Atlanta.

In more other words, they’d rather spend the money on pet projects than keep from adding another nickel to the cost of a can of green beans because it took the truck eight hours to get from the plant to the grocery store instead of five.

Well, the secretary’s concern sent us straight to the Congressional menu to see how many different varieties of pork we could find.

Plenty.

To be exact, 9,241 on the Omnibus budget menu, according to the Heritage Foundation, which also said funding for the projects totaled just over $23.5 billion.

So what did we find on the menu?

• $108,000 for Monticello and Price Vault Toilet installations in Utah.

• $100,000 to develop a walking tour of Boydton, Va.

• $150,000 for rodent control on the Aleutian Islands.

• $250,000 to construct the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Center in Washington.

• $800,000 to the Father’s Day Rally Committee Inc.

• $878,046 for the Catfish Genome in Auburn, Ala.

• $105,000 to Graffiti Deterrence Technologies in Rosemead, Calif.

• $470,000 for the Asian Long-Horned Beetle project in Illinois.

• $244,077 for bee research in Weslaco, Texas.

• $735,000 for barley research in Idaho.

• $135,907 for potato breeding in Prosser, Wash.

There were several projects on the list we might not classify pork because the money would go (at least supposedly) to projects to help underprivileged children grow personally and professionally.

But you get the point.

A country that can turn athletic boosters loose to raise enough “foundation” money to pay a college football coach $4 million a year, 100 times the salary of many professors at the same university, can certainly raise enough private money to prevent tax dollars from being used for rodent control and graffiti deterrence.

Peters chaired the commission.

So apparently strong was the disagreement that she and Maria Cino and Rick Geddes had with the final report that they did not attend the news conference where the report was released.

“There is nothing to indicate that Washington would do a better job spending billions more of the taxpayers’ money than it has so far,” Peters said the day the report was released. “The answer isn’t more taxes and added layers of bureaucracy, it is having the courage to say the current system is broken and it is time to find a better way to invest in, manage and operate our transportation system.”

Also of interest in the report was the continued mention of privatization of highways, although the report does encourage strong guidelines to prevent short-term, localized benefit to the detriment of the broader national plan.

The day the report was released, we received word of a research project that showed placing more burden on the trucking industry through higher road tolls would only drive the big rigs off the safer four-lane highways and onto two-lane roads, which in turn would likely cause more traffic accidents.

Most in our industry don’t like the idea of privatization of the highway system.

Neither do they like the idea of spending tax dollars collected from fuel taxes on anything else but their intended use.

So who’s going to figure all this out and come up with the perfect solution?

We don’t know, but we do have an idea.

Boydton, Va., is not too far from Washington.

Sometimes you can come up with some real good ideas during a long walk.