JOHN BRUMMETT: Highway shell game

The next step in this busy season at the state Capitol is to approve the governor's plan to tap Barack Obama's Medicaid expansion money to buy a vast supply of Band-Aids made of asphalt and concrete.

The governor's office calls that a highway program.

You get the idea that Asa Hutchinson is finished for a while being the columnist-pleasing centrist. He appears to be entering that inevitable season in which he'll go all Bobby Jindal on us.


Hutchinson simply had to have that recently approved Medicaid expansion for his budget. He had no arithmetical choice other than to be progressive in that instance. But now that it's done, he apparently has no intention of taking the state's omnipresent highway funding challenge very seriously.

His plan for the third legislative session of the spring, beginning May 19, is to tap for highways the margins of the state's general revenue fund. That would be a tradition-breaking practice. And there is good reason for the tradition. Highways ought to be funded by users. General taxes ought to pay for general needs.

Hutchinson specifically intends to spend general revenue "surplus" funds, which aren't actually "surplus" funds if they're pre-emptively spent.

His plan is to do this bare minimum of a shell game to accomplish two things:

• Allow the Highway Department at least to match available federal funds for maintenance projects.

• Free him to get to the GOP gubernatorial primary without having both embraced Obamacare and raised taxes.

He openly hinged this Band-Aid application for highways on first getting the Medicaid expansion, with its requisite savings for the general fund. And that led to the assertion in this space that the governor was proposing to fill potholes with Obamacare.

Which reminds me: I need to check with the city about whether there is any Obamacare available to put in these potholes in the alley behind my house. We have a dire need for universal health insurance out there. Otherwise somebody is going to lose a Fiat or a Miata.

Smooth roadways are a powerful political cause. People like them. Powerful contracting companies like them. Their lobbyists like them. The five constitutionally independent highway commissioners like them. Our motor vehicles' suspension systems appreciate them.

Legislators will ponder taxes for highways when they'd tell public schools to tighten their belts.

The people even voted themselves a constitutional amendment in 2012 imposing a half-cent sales tax for a decade so the Highway Commission could tear up downtown Little Rock by making Interstate 30 the eighth concrete wonder of the world.

So it's kind of interesting that Asa's minimalist proposal for highways is encountering Republican resistance on account of its being too timid.

Four Republican state senators--Jimmy Hickey of Texarkana, Bill Sample of Hot Springs, Ronald Caldwell of Wynne and Greg Standridge of Russellville--have proposed raising the per-gallon fuel tax by five cents next year and by three cents a few years after that.

It's kind of brave, actually, if unimaginative. The problem is that a pure per-gallon tax, based solely on consumption, has no flexibility as cars become more fuel-efficient and highway maintenance costs grow. It's why we have the problem now.

I've long suggested putting the sales tax on motor fuel on top of the per-gallon tax, so that we'd be covered both by consumption and price. It's an elastic form of revenue generation.

A Democratic state senator, Keith Ingram of West Memphis, who fancies himself running against Hutchinson for governor, was quoted over the weekend as saying there was a bipartisan "window" for actually addressing taxes and a long-term solution to the highway problem.

He told me legislators are interested in the idea of "indexing" the motor-fuel tax, meaning tying its rate to inflation. He also said the sales-tax idea isn't bad.

But he and the Senate Democratic caucus aren't taking any lead. They've merely told the governor they don't like using general revenue for highways and that several ideas are bubbling up even in the governor's own party.

I guess that's fair. If the voters had wanted Democrats to run things, they wouldn't have fired so many of them.

State Rep. Michael John Gray of Augusta, head of the House Democratic caucus, tells me the caucus:

• Supports looking at all highway funding options.

• Believes that the governor should show leadership on the issue.

• Asserts that a long-term solution is better.

• Warns that tapping surplus funds is not the best way to go.

I predict the Legislature will wallow around for a few days and then find the votes only to oblige Asa's new season of right-leaning minimalism.

But you never know about highways. Once then-Gov. Bill Clinton vetoed a motor-fuel tax increase and told legislators to go override him because the highways needed the money.

And this current governor has had much more recent experience with veto trickery.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 05/10/2016

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