A bridge too far

I drove down a main street in Beirut the other night and couldn’t believe how bad the potholes were. I mean some were big enough to swallow a small child. Oh wait, I haven’t left the country in some time so I couldn’t have been in Beirut. Where was I then? Now I remember, I was actually on route 7 in Latham not far from the circle. Good God how can a town let the roads get this bad?

Now some of you will point out that it has been a tough winter with the constant freezing and thawing; that is murder on pavement. Others may tell me I have nothing to worry about because our president and lawmakers are passing a massive infrastructure project and trillions from that will be earmarked for the many roads and bridges that are falling apart. It’s that spending that I want to talk about today

I’m a big fan of the government spending money on things that impact regular folks in an everyday way so fixing broken down roads sounds like a good place to start. There’s just one problem, you already paid for those roads to be fixed and I suspect you forgot. What am I talking about? Gasoline taxes my friend. Those massive, intrusive, you have no choice but to pay them, gasoline taxes. Every time you pump a gallon of gas you are paying through the nose and pumping a fortune in the government coffers.

Consider just two states -- California and New York. In sunny California motorists pay the state 59 cents in taxes every time they buy a gallon of gas. Then you tack on the 18.4 cents for the federal tax and those poor people are dropping more than 77 cents per gallon; and here I thought the mudslides and wildfires were bad enough. Here in not so sunny New York it is almost as bad. We pay 44 cents per gallon on gasoline and add in that federal tax as well bringing us to around 62 cents a gallon.

Years ago when politicians told us they needed to tax our gas they promised us the money raised would be used to maintain the roads and bridges. They also told us if we allowed tolls on the NYS Thruway it would be temporary but let’s not talk about that today I only have so much Advil left in the bottle. So why are you hitting potholes everywhere? Why do some of the bridges look like they’d tip over with a swift kick from a mule? Simple, your elected officials haven’t been using the fuel taxes you paid the way they promised.

Four years ago this month State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli issued a report on this very problem although I suspect I was the only one to read it. It concluded that only 22 percent of the gasoline taxes we pay in New York went to capital road projects. Keep in mind the year he did the report we paid $3.8 billion in gasoline taxes so simple math tells you nearly $3 billion dollars that should have gone to roads and bridges did not. According to DiNapoli it was spent paying down debt and diverted to other state funds. Critics of the report said he wasn’t being fair because a good chunk of the money went toward snow and ice removal from roads and paying operating costs at DMV. I suppose since both of those involve cars and trucks they thought that should count. I don’t.

I think if you want to collect a generous salary as a state representative or governor you should do exactly what you say you’re going to do; especially when it comes to spending other people’s money.

I’m not just trying to indict the people running the empire state; I know the same thing is happening everywhere. Politicians have too much need for too little money and when they see a wheelbarrow full of cash sitting there they can’t help but grab some for another purpose.

I’ll tell you something funny. Back when I read DiNapoli’s jarring report I ran to my boss at the time in TV news and told him we had to do a story on this. “They are stealing our gas money for other things and the roads are falling apart” I remember screaming at him. My boss just scratched his chin, turned his head sideways the way a dog does when they are confused and said, “I think most people would find this story boring. Too many numbers.” Yeah, that was my point, there are a lot of numbers and they are being moved from one column to another and nobody is paying attention. Needless to say we never did the story.

I’d just about forgotten about the whole thing until recently when I heard everyone in Washington talking about investing in “infrastructure” and crowing about the terrible need to fix our crumbling roads and bridges. “If only we had money” they kept saying. Just remember they have trillions of dollars to fix things and you already paid it over the last two decades. The next time you see a public official scarfing down a lunch on the taxpayers dime remember that.