On day of primary, more proof of Walker/WisGOP failures on road funding

No matter who wins tonight's Democratic primary for Governor, one thing that candidate needs to talk about is the handcuffing of local government, how it's led to the state's roads falling apart, and connecting it to the decisions made by Scott Walker and other Wisconsin Republicans in the last 7 1/2 years.

This was shown again with the recent release of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities' State of Wisconsin’s Cities and Villages. As the LWM's document noted, Walker's DOT did not help localities fund their roads in the most recent year measured, either through the regular amount of general shared revenues, or in specific road aids.

State Aids Stagnant. The slowdown in total revenue growth was largely due to stagnant state aid, which rose just 0.1% in 2016. The largest aid to cities and villages, shared revenues, was unchanged, while road aids declined 2.3%. The drop in road aids resulted from a nearly 50% decline in funding for the local road improvement program (LRIP), which pays up to half of eligible costs for repairing “seriously deteriorating” roads. Relatively few projects are funded each year. LRIP funding nearly doubled in 2015, and in 2016 it returned to its 2014 level.

This is related to the decision by Walker and his GOP lackeys in the Legislature to follow the orders of DC lobbyist Grover Norquist in refusing to raise gas taxes or most registration fees. And it's getting worse, as Wisconsin Public Radio recently reported on a DOT move designed to stretch the state's limited dollars in the Tranportation Fund, but in reality lets WisDOT skimp on its share of highway projects.

After years of bridge replacement delays due to a lack of state funding, the DOT has rolled out a new program called "Replace-In-Kind." It directs local governments applying for state bridge aid to design replacements to minimum state engineering standards based on current traffic. If the application qualifies, the state promises to pay for 80 percent of the replacement cost with local governments picking up the rest.

If counties or municipalities want to design bridges that go beyond the minimum standards, the "Replace-In-Kind" policy lets them do it but on their own dime.

See if you can spot the flaw in this thinking, beyond just having the money-strapped local governments have to pay with increasingly scarce funds.

The key words are “based on current traffic,” and let’s have Price County Highway Commissioner Don Grande explain why.

"Once this bridge is replaced, this bridge will serve PCA, the paper company over in Tomahawk, as a direct route off of Highway 8," said Grande. "The traffic volumes will increase once the bridge is replaced and the weight limits come off. We’re concerned that we’re going to under-size or under-design that bridge just to be able [to get] the funding.

There won't be more traffic here at some point, will there?

And if Price County thinks there will be more traffic coming across that bridge once it's fully re-opened, it has to pay for any capacity increases under the Walker DOT’s “rightsizing” program, and many Wisconsin places are struggling to come up with the money to do so.

While the DOT and the governor have celebrated "Replace-In-Kind" for helping the state approve 183 bridge replacements, Wisconsin County Highway Association Executive Director Dan Fedderly said the real test will be how many local governments can afford to build them.

"So all we're doing is shifting the cost to a place where you can’t fund them," said Fedderly. "And without a comprehensive, sustainable, long-term revenue at the state level we will only be talking about this over and over and we’re at the point where there is no ability to shift those costs."

And it's not just the bridges. Let's go back to the LWM report, where it clearly shows that local roads have deteriorated in recent years,

Every two years, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (DOT) collects information from cities and villages on street quality. The 2017 data is self-reported by municipal officials using a standardized DOT rating system for road segments. (See box on page 13.) The rated streets account for about 87% of the 49,100 total miles in these cities and villages. The share of road miles with ratings has remained relatively constant over the past three years and we focus our analysis on these street segments.

“Good” or Better. Statewide, 2017 saw a drop in the share of city and village roads that local officials rated as “good,” “very good,” or “excellent.” The percentage fell to 67.7% from 68.8% in 2016 and is now 4.3 percentage points below the 2011 mark of 72%. (See Figure 2.8, page 12.) Despite these declines, more than two-thirds of municipal roads require little or no repair. Streets rated “good” or better need relatively minor maintenance, such as coating pavement with a sealer or filling cracks, but not major rehabilitation or new construction. The decrease this year in the reported number of high-quality streets was driven by a decline in the percentage of streets rated “excellent” and “very good.” In 2017, 14.7% of streets were rated “excellent” and 15.5% were rated “very good,” down 0.6 and 1.5 percentage points respectively from the previous year.

“Fair” or Worse. With a lower percentage of streets rated “good” or better by city and village officials, the percentage rated “fair” or worse inevitably increased. In 2016, 31.2% of streets were rated “fair,” “poor,” “very poor,” or “failed,” but in 2017, that share increased to 32.3%. The reported increase in lower-quality streets was driven mostly by an increase in roads rated “fair” and “very poor,” up 1 and 0.2 percentage points respectively.

And the LWM says this is especially true in the smaller Wisconsin communities, who have also suffered from declining tax bases and populations.

By Population Group. The smallest cities and villages had the biggest declines in road quality. (See Table 2.4.) Communities of fewer than 15,000 people reported the largest drops in the share of streets rated “good” or better and the largest increases in roads rated “poor” or worse. In spite of this change, cities and villages with between 1,000 and 15,000 residents generally have better quality roads than larger municipalities. But in 2017, the gap in road quality narrowed between these communities and the largest urban areas.

And yet Scott Walker and WisGOP Legislators, who have owed a lot of victories to winning in rural areas, seem to have absolutely no plan to stop local roads from falling apart. Walker continues to spout Koched-up goobledygook about "no net tax increase", which isn't going to pay the bills when we have deficits of $1 billion looming in both the General and Transportation funds.

The other problem with Walker's and WisGOP's assed policies on state aids is that they have consistently decided to make local communities adhere to strict property tax limits so they can have an increasingly out-of-favor talking point. As a result, local communities have few options they have left under state law, which helps explain all of the wheel taxes that have been cropping up in Wisconsin over the last 5 years. The latest area looking at a new registration fee is in La Crosse, who are looking at a fee between $25 and $56 a year.

Like a lot of other things in this state, it'll take electing Democrats to stop this decline, and to free up local communities to take in the money that they need to keep more Scottholes from appearing. And what got us in this mess is the intentional buck-passing and outright failure to keep up the roads by Walker and other WisGOPs, and it should be something hit on constantly for the next 12 weeks by whoever is able to win the Dem primary tonight.