Road needs coming home to roost

By David McGrath Schwartz

Sunday, Feb. 3, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The pain of a slowing economy and its impact on the state’s general fund budget — cuts to social services, education, prisons — have dominated Nevada’s public policy debate in recent months.

But as one transportation advocate notes, there’s an “elephant being swept under the rug.”

Next year the state will need to find $1 billion to $2 billion in new revenue to prevent major transportation projects from sitting on the shelf due to a lack of money, according to the Nevada Transportation Department director.

If that money isn’t found, the state will risk having to delay major highway projects otherwise ready to start construction, said Susan Martinovich, the director of the Transportation Department.

So far, Martinovich said, none of the state’s major road projects has been held up due to a lack of money. That’s thanks to the $1 billion in funding that Gov. Jim Gibbons and the Legislature redirected during the past session, as well as normal revenues from fuel taxes and other sources.

But the $1 billion-plus won’t meet all the state’s transportation needs. To pay for 10 “super and mega projects,” the state needs about $3.8 billion in revenue between now and 2015, a December 2006 task force report said.

The amount is likely higher because of cost increases for materials such as steel and asphalt, transportation consultant Tom Skancke said.

Martinovich said the Transportation Department still is working to come up with an updated amount of money that the state needs. But she emphasized that to date, financing has not affected construction timetables.

“Even if we received all the money today, whatever the amount is, we couldn’t spend it all today,” she said. Instead, engineering and environmental impact studies are often the cause of delays.

By 2009, though, “there will be more projects ready to go, and if we don’t get any money, projects will be sitting there,” she said.

Few specific solutions have been offered to raise that money. Gibbons has not wavered from his opposition to new taxes or fees. He also is opposed to establishing tolls for existing state roads, his spokeswoman Melissa Subbotin said.

Finding additional funding “is absolutely something we’re working on, and something that’s one of the governor’s top priorities,” Subbotin said.

She pointed to a state advisory panel that is currently studying possible public-private solutions such as tolls on new roads or privately built roads that the state would lease.

The search for answers comes as a group calling itself the Nevada Highway Users Coalition is in the midst of a TV advertising campaign across the state that urges citizens to contact their legislators to press them to address the transportation problem.

“There’s a problem and there needs to be a solution,” said Danny Thompson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Nevada State AFL-CIO and a member of the coalition.

Right now, the group is simply trying to raise awareness about transportation problems with the ads, which have cost between $200,000 and $300,000, according to a spokesman.

But the coalition, made up of politicians, businessmen and union leaders, has not settled on any specific proposals to meet the spending need.

They are not alone.

In the past legislative session, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and local governments had money diverted from them to pay for the $1 billion worth of projects.

“At this time, there are no plans to go back to the convention authority as a source of additional transportation funding,” Subbotin said. There also are no current plans to go after local governments’ funding again, she said.

Others criticized Gibbons’ no-new-taxes position and wonder how the roads will get built without them.

“The governor’s no-new-tax and no-new-fee position is a problem,” Thompson said. “I don’t believe it’s prudent not to allow the Legislature to solve the problem. At the end of the day, transportation impacts everything in the state.”

Skancke said the state should examine toll roads, increasing the fuel tax and measures such as charging drivers for miles traveled.

“This discussion is going to take a phenomenal amount of courage, to tell the public, this is what we’re going to do,” he said. “This is not taking room tax, or gaming tax, or developer fees. This is telling the driving public they are going to have to pay.”