Senate Bill Would Raise Money for Roads

资讯中心

来源：Asphalt Contractor 发布日期：2008-4-30

While the Bush administration is pushing futuristic electronic toll roads as a way to raise money for highway and bridge projects, Sen. John Thune is working to create a new $50 billion bond program to pay for transportation needs.

The Build America Bonds Act would provide at least $500 million to South Dakota over the program''s six-year lifespan, Thune said. That would be in addition to the roughly $214 million a year the state already gets each year from the federal highway trust fund.

Unlike the trust fund, which gets its money from the federal gas tax, the new program would issue 30-year bonds and pay off the principal with a portion of the existing federal customs tax. Instead of getting interest payments, bondholders would get tax credits.

Thune and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat who introduced the measure in September, met with U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Mary Peters this week to seek her support. The federal highway trust fund is projected to be $1.4 billion in the red by the end of 2009. The last time Congress increased the gas tax was in 1993.

Bergquist said a state legislative committee will attempt to answer that question and report its findings in the fall.

The U.S. Transportation Department has not yet taken a formal position on the proposal by Thune and colleagues, said acting undersecretary for policy Tyler Duvall.

Duvall agrees that new approaches for raising money to build and maintain transportation infrastructure are sorely needed. His agency is lobbying for a nationwide electronic tolling system in which drivers would pay a user tax every time they hit the road. Instead of toll booths, the system would track road usage through license plate readers or transponders, Duvall said. Such a system might save rural residents money, he said, because their roads are cheaper to maintain than city roads, so the toll would be less.

"The poll numbers we''ve seen show the public increasingly does not support gas taxes or other indirect taxes for transportation," Duvall said. "If it''s structured correctly, they do support a direct payment mechanism, similar to the way they pay for their telephone service or electricity bill."

But electronic toll roads are at least 10 years away, if not longer, because of glitches in existing system designs, said Brian Deery, spokesman for Associated General Contractors. His group supports the Build America Bonds Act because it will be paid for mostly with user fees.

Much of the congestion on the roads and rails is related to the movement of goods into and out of the country, he said. States like South Dakota are seeing congestion on their local rail systems because of international trade, Deery said.

"A lot of freight moves through the state, and there are places where there are bottlenecks that need to be fixed," Deery said. "But (road) projects have gotten so expensive, it''s difficult for one state to undertake a mega project like that."