Our View: Trump’s infrastructure plan needs work.

Central Florida — Eatonville, specifically — will be in the national spotlight Friday when President Trump makes an appearance to promote his $1.5 trillion plan to build or upgrade roads, bridges, airports, seaports, water and sewer systems, and other infrastructure. It’s nice to be noticed by the White House. But the president’s plan needs some reconstruction of its own.

Despite its $1.5 trillion bottom line, the plan calls for spending just 13 percent of that total, $200 billion, in federal funds over the next decade. The plan envisions the rest — $1.3 trillion — coming from state, local and private sources. That’s a stretch.

Most state and local governments will be hard pressed to take over the federal government’s traditional role as the primary source of funding on major infrastructure projects. They can’t run deficits like Washington. And the tax bill Congress passed and the president signed in December discourages state and local governments from raising taxes by limiting their deductibility. In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott and Republican leaders in the Legislature are pushing a proposal to require super-majority approval in the state House and Senate to raise any taxes.

Private investors, for their part, will only bankroll projects that promise them a profit. They might insist, for example, on adding tolls to highway projects and claiming revenue from them. That inducement persuaded private investors to help finance, and accelerate, the upgrade of Interstate 4 through Orlando — the backdrop the White House chose for Friday’s presidential appearance. But tolls or other revenue streams might not be available or appropriate for every project that needs to get built.

The president’s plan calls for Congress to make cuts in other parts of the budget to come up with the federal share of dollars. This is another unrealistic expectation, considering lawmakers just found it necessary to increase spending by $500 billion in a deal to keep the government open.

Congress could augment the federal investment in the president’s plan without depending on cuts or deeper deficits by hiking the federal gasoline tax. It hasn’t been raised since 1993, and its value keeps eroding due to inflation and greater vehicle fuel efficiency. This idea is popular with more than just the usual tax-andspend suspects on Capitol Hill. Last month the U.S. Chamber of Commerce unveiled a proposal to phase in a 25-cent-per-gallon hike in the gas tax that would generate more than $375 billion over 10 years.

The president’s plan also calls for streamlining the lengthy permitting process for infrastructure projects. This is a worthy goal, as long as it doesn’t endanger public health, safety or the environment.

There’s no question the nation’s infrastructure is overdue for an upgrade. As the president’s plan points out, the average American spends 42 hours a year stuck in traffic, which wastes 3.1 billion gallons of fuel. Almost 40 percent of U.S. bridges are more than a half-century old. Last year water-main breaks wasted more than 2 trillion gallons of drinking water.

Projects to fix problems like these would create millions of jobs. They would avoid more-expensive emergency repairs in the future. They would make the United States more competitive in the global economy by moving its people and goods faster, and delivering water and other basic services more efficiently.

A senior White House official told the Washington Post this week that the president intended his blueprint as “the start of a negotiation — bicameral, bipartisan negotiation — to find the best solution for infrastructure in the U.S.” The sooner Congress gets to work on a realistic plan, the better.