Ige tax hike plan would fill budget holes, not potholes

It’s disturbing that state senators are going along with Gov. David Ige’s dubious plan to increase taxes and fees on Hawaii drivers to pay for roadwork that was already taxed for and should have been done long ago.

The Senate approved and passed to the House Ige’s bill to raise $75.3 million a year for highway maintenance and improvements by increasing the gasoline tax to 19 cents from 16 cents a gallon, the vehicle registration fee to $76.50 from $45 and the passenger vehicle weight tax to 2.75 cents from 1.75 cents per pound.

The measure passed the Senate 16 to 8, with six of the yes votes cast “with reservations” — the political equivalent of sex with a condom. Prospects are uncertain in the House, where a companion bill stalled in committee.

Hawaii residents are among the most highly taxed in the nation, including highway assessments, yet we have the worst roads in the country, according to a 2014 report by the Reason Foundation.

The report said a big reason for our poor highway performance and lack of cost-effectiveness is our high administrative costs of $90,000 per mile, compared to $4,000 in Texas and $1,000 in Kentucky.

In other words, far too much of our highway tax revenues go to bureaucrats sitting in offices instead of crews working to fix the rutted roads.

Equally problematic is the persistent raids on the highway fund by governors and the Legislature, in which money raised for road maintenance and repairs is diverted to plug holes elsewhere in the budget.

According to a 2007 estimate by University of Hawaii engineering professor Panos Prevedouros, more than $153 million was raided from the state highway fund between 1996 and 2006, which was multiplied by the loss of federal matching funds of up to 80 percent that would have been available if those local dollars had been spent as intended on highway improvements.

The state Transportation Department is woefully lax at spending the federal highway money the state does receive, some $160 million a year.

After the state backlog of unspent federal highway funds approached $1 billion in 2010, federal officials threatened to withhold further money if the state didn’t spend it more timely.

Today, the unspent backlog of federal funds is still over $600 million.

The problem isn’t, as Ige and legislators imply, that insufficient tax funds were raised to pay for maintaining roads; the problem is that ample monies raised were diverted by politicians or poorly managed by administrators.

Motorists shouldn’t be squeezed to finance more failure.

Let’s see an honest accounting of exactly what we’ll get for the money, what’s being done to cut administrative costs, how much has been diverted from the highway fund, what will prevent further raids and how we’ll better use federal money.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.