Why doesn't local government have enough money for core services like paving streets anymore? I don't think it's because there is a push to make streets undrivable for cars - bikes use them too. Consider this:
- Money gets diverted to too many non-core services and programs that sound good and feel good, but are not core services of local government and better left to non-profit or for-profit groups to undertake.
- Government can't do it all and needs to define what it can has to do, and then make this mission sustainable* with the money it gets from property taxes.
- Core services has been expanded to include bike and pedestrian paths as a transportation mode. All capital improvement projects' costs are estimated without maintenance included. The more paths, the more general fund money for maintenance. (Sidewalks don't count since once built, property owners are responsible for maintaining them.)
- Money from property taxes is diverted to pay debt service on bonds in a revolving door of urban renewal programs that freeze taxes for valuable properties for decades. More need, less money. Brilliant. Government becomes addicted to this growing pot of money so new districts are formed and old districts never die.
- Llight rail and streetcars - need I say more? They are money pits with more being planned.
Let's say, in a perfect world, everyone could agree that government needed more money to build up a transportation network.
How, exactly, do you spend that money in a way that leaves everyone feeling like they got their money's worth?
Members of the Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation tackled that topic Thursday, in an open-ended conversation that followed a chat from Rep. Earl Blumenauer.
Blumenauer has been beating the drums of a gas tax increase for months, noting that the federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1991. Without any increases, the federal government has to take money from other tax revenue – namely, the income tax – to cover road construction costs.
With transportation projects competing with the military, social programs and education for federal general fund dollars, there's less money available to build roads and other transportation improvements in the United States.
Blumenauer, a Democrat from Portland, proposed a bill last year that would raise the 18 cent-a-gallon gas tax to its inflation-adjusted 1991 value – around 33.4 cents a gallon – and peg it to inflation so the tax doesn't lose value every year.
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Wow! 33 cents-a-gallon! How will those on the lower end of the income scale deal with this? More federal money to compensate? Maybe more government housing? Metro wants more of that too - with federal funding. Maybe we'll all wind up in government housing riding busses and rail, but I don't know where the money would come from.
The quote from Novick is intended make you feel his taxing idea are morally justified. Politicians want to tell people how to spend their dwindling disposable income, until there isn't any.
Gas taxes should remain in the state. The added layer of government is a drain on everybody's dollar. When the money comes back to the states, it has strings attached, directed at pet programs of pols. All of the money is not spent on what you imagine by listening to politicians. The money flows to Metro and the State where even more strings are attached before they decide who wins their grant money. So whatever you think the money is intended for, it's only a tenth of the truth.
*sustainable
adjective
- 1.able to be maintained at a certain rate or level."sustainable fusion reactions"
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