LITTLE ROCK — The co-chairmen of a special committee looking into changing the way Arkansas pays for road construction expressed doubt that the 2011 meeting of the Legislature will take up legislation based on the committee’s final report.
“It may not take off immediately,” state Sen. John Paul Capps, D-Searcy, cochairman of the Arkansas Blue Ribbon Committee on Highway Finance, told reporters after a meeting of the committee Wednesday. “But if we come up with a well-thought-out program for these roads and nothing is done and these roads start crumbling ... then someday some aggressive someone or somebodies are going to reach and get that [report] and say, ‘This looks good.’ Not necessarily in 2011.”
In a separate comment to reporters, the committee’s other cochairman, state Rep. Allen Maxwell, DMonticello, said much the same thing. The committee’s final report won’t be ready until Dec. 1, which will leave little time to digest the report and fashion legislation from it in time for the Legislature’s regular session, which begins the next month. The committee is now working on an interim report, which is due July 1.
“If they pay attention to the interim recommendation, they could have time to,” Maxwell said. “But you’re going to have a new Legislature ... [including] 40-something new House members. They are going to have to get oriented to this. I don’t know if in 2011 they will do anything or not. It may go out to 2013.That’s going to be up to the next Legislature. I won’t be here.”
Capps won’t be returning to the Legislature, either. Both men were unable to stand for re-election because of the term-limits amendment to the Arkansas Constitution.
The committee met for about 90 minutes Wednesday to review a draft of the interim report, which is designed to be a catalog of the work the committee has done to date.
The 18-member committee has been meeting for a year to develop recommendations for the state Legislature’s 2011 regular session. Act 374 of 2009 puts the committee in charge of defining an adequate system to pay for improvements on state highways, county roads and city streets. Under the law, the committee was supposed to have submitted its recommendations to the governor and others by July 1, though the law contains no penalty for not doing so.
State Sen. Steve Faris, DCentral, who also isn’t returning to the Legislature because of term limits, said he doesn’t believe the next Legislature will be able to take up whatever recommendations the committee develops, mainly because of the Dec. 1 date. Faris isn’t a member of the committee.
The date the final report is due is “so close to the next session, it could make it very difficult for legislators to educate themselves about the issue to pass something of this magnitude,” Faris said. “ You’ve got to have total confidence [in the proposal] when you’re going to be asked to vote for higher taxes, especially.” But Maxwell believes the final recommendations will still have a shot at consideration next year.
“All we’re trying to do is go through these things carefully, deliberately,” he said. “We want more time to deal with those issues to get a greater consensus on the committee. The legislation can come rather quickly.” A tentative goal of the committee has been to find $200 million in new funding, but the committee has entertained at least one idea that would raise more than $3 billion. Both committee co-chairmen view the idea favorably, though they insist it isn’t a formal proposal and that the committee hasn’t considered it.
Under what Madison Murphy of El Dorado, a member of the committee representing the Arkansas Highway Commission, called an option the committee might consider, the state would impose a half cent sales tax to be used for a bond program that would expire after 10 years. Also during that 10 years, sales-tax revenue from new and used vehicles, vehicle-repair parts and services, tires and batteries would phase in to be used for road construction.
Together, the option would generate $3.833 billion over 10 years.
“If you could imagine what it would do for this state if we had that much money to spend on our roads,” Capps said. “It would reach all of us.
Good roads change people’s lives. I spent the first 17 years of my life on a mud, dirt road.
I was raised way out in the country. I thought to myself that ‘if I have the opportunity to do something about this, I will.’ And I did.”
Gov. Mike Beebe expressed opposition to an earlier subcommittee recommendation to transfer sales-tax revenue to highways from the state’s general fund, which pays for education, prisons, human services and other state functions.
But supporters of Murphy’s option say that by phasing in the transfer over 10 years, it would merely cut into the rate of growth in the general fund and not represent an actual cut in the general fund.
“I’m not sure he’s going to come out against it,” Capps said of the governor. “What we’ll recommend I think will probably rub people as a little ambitious, but if we don’t come up with a big enough program that we’ll make a big dent in what [we have] to do in Arkansas, why do it?
“You can raise gas taxes 3 cents a gallon and put a little hot mix on some of these roads out here that are breaking up, but you can’t do what Arkansas needs - the four lane corridors, that sort of thing,” he said. “Those will make Arkansas.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 06/24/2010