Future is grim if Ariz. won’t expand transit

n a dynamic, fast-changing economy, job creators have options.

If you construct an environment that is conducive to economic growth — one that includes the necessary fundamentals, such as educational opportunities, good qualify-of-life options and sound transportation — the jobs will come. Growth will happen. Or so the economists say.

There is a flip side. If you do not provide the essential elements of growth, they will go elsewhere. In Arizona’s case, to Texas. Or Nevada. Or, even still,

EDITORIALS BY DOUG MacEACHERN to California. The American economy is dynamic and business has options.

By nearly every measure, Arizona’s commitment to transportation is flagging. We are failing to keep up with the competition. And that could prove deadly to the state’s economy.

Today, the state is resting on its laurels. Having built hundreds of miles of freeways in the past quarter-century, and 20 miles of

| THE REPUBLIC light-rail transit in the Phoenix metropolitan area, we seem to have concluded that’s enough. It isn’t.

The funding formula for transportation is leaking badly. Based largely on a gas tax that does not account for inflation and a halfcent sales tax that falters badly in recessionary times, Arizona’s Highway Users Revenue Fund, or HURF, is capable of producing barely a third of the revenue needed to meet state needs over the next 20 years.

The numbers are profound. Just to fund basic transportation needs, state transporation officials calculated in 2010 that Arizona would need to find an additional $62.7 billion over the next 25 years to cover the state’s transportation needs. That doesn’t include the great economy-enhancing engine of them all: an Interstate 11 linking Phoenix with Las Vegas.