In all of the clutter expressed
about Louisiana transportation needs and funding options that almost always
focus on raising gasoline excise taxes at the pump, gubernatorial candidate Sen.
David Vitter came up with something
different. Unfortunately, in this case, “different” does not mean “better.”
It’s not that Vitter’s idea for a
taxation regime at the local level that could come from a variety of sources was
worse than tacking on more cents to the gallon – it actually could turn out
better by presenting more options – but that in his idea was to
make it regional. Employed in a few isolated instances in the country –
perhaps the best examples being the Metro government in and around Portland,
OR, and the Metropolitan Council in the area containing and around Minneapolis
and St. Paul, MN – the idea is that greater efficiency in use of tax dollars
and better planning come from subgovernments working together instead of in
uncoordinated fashion or even at cross-purposes.
Transportation systems provide a
key input into how metropolitan areas grow and the economic development that
comes from that. Haphazard structuring resulting from discrete units deciding
independently would come substantially less often through chance if some kind
of regional government made decisions about building roads, mandating that this
unit takes care of collecting the revenues to finance building and executing
that task.
Yet note the geographical
limitation here – this is more a metropolitan idea than a regional idea. The
state simply cannot be divided into units that mix and match urban/suburban
areas and rural areas and have this idea work well. Individual local government
needs simply differ too greatly and they would chafe under Vitter’s proposal,
which apparently would have the same level of tax, whether excise, sales, or
property, dedicated by each government in the region diverted to a pool of
money used for transportation decided in some consultative fashion. No matter
how sliced, inevitably almost all of those dollars would get spent on
metropolitan areas and therefore rural residents disproportionately would pay
the freight.
Let’s say instead Vitter’s “regional”
conception really meant “metropolitan,” to moot this concern. Still, even with
that out of the way, the decision-making structure about taxing and how to use
the proceeds would be controversial, to say the least. Some kind of
supra-municipal/supra-parish local government would have to come into being
constitutionally, creating rival power centers to the traditional local
governments, much like as developed with creation of regional flood protection
authorities but the membership of which for political reasons simply cannot be
regionally-appointed officials; unlike with levees that are few and largely out
of sight, with numerous roads affecting intimately life within any municipality
and parish, representation will have to be on the basis of local governmental
units. That imports controversy about what units effectively would control the
new government and worries about whether they could impose their preferences onto
unwilling others.
And with a well-embedded history of
very localized land use decisions in the political culture, local governments
and their publics would be extremely skeptical of handing over powers in these
areas to these new subgovernments. The recent history of a flood
protection authority going rogue demonstrates the very real threat easily
envisioned among the citizenry that would discourage its political support needed
to make the Constitutional and statutory changes required.
Of course, the state could try to
avoid these issues by not having a centralizing subgovernment involved, with itself
acting as transportation planner and executor with the financing authorized by
the existing local governments. But this would create a logistical nightmare
that might never allow for any projects to go forward; to implement a regional
plan, for example using an increase in the gasoline tax, every municipality and
parish in the area would have to have their publics vote affirmatively to raise
those taxes on themselves, with likely at least a few areas feeling the plan shortchanges
them relative to their input and inclined to turn it down.
So while the idea is interesting,
it seems relatively impractical compared to changing the
Constitution to allow for local governments to tack on extra gasoline taxes
within their boundaries. That doesn’t do much for coordination purposes, but if
local populations want to do that to their people and businesses who fill up their
tanks and use those revenues for roads, it’s much likelier they could do that
than it is to set up a much more complicated process almost guaranteed to
produce little if anything.
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