Road budgets explained

By MICHAEL HALEY

There was one big pothole on Highway 29 that I had driven over for years, I learned to look out for it every time I drove home, and there it would be. I could count on having to swerve around it. After a while I grew to like looking out for it, swerving on cue every time I went by.

Ever mindful of doing service for the community, I even got to the point where I would try to warn the tourists driving behind me, here it comes, by making a big swerve a ways out in front of them, and sure enough I would occasionally induce the cars behind me to swerve around it like I did. It was one of those little things in life that you can be proud of doing for humanity.

Like a faithful dog waiting at the door at home, that pothole let me know I was almost there. Then one day it was gone, finally patched over by CalTrans. It was kind of an odd letdown, like a town that changed when you grew up and it just wasn’t the same.

But what the heck, it’s just a pothole, there is a lot of other more important things to cry about, like maybe the 10 million potholes left in Napa after that one. We all have plenty of swerving left ahead of us here.

In case ... like me ... you wonder how we got to such a place of primitive roads, it is helpful to understand where the road budget money comes from and why of all things it seems to be the one thing that is chronically underfunded.

The main problem is that most of the money for roads comes from the state, and we all know what is happening with the state budget. Still, this has gone on for years even in good budget years for the state (a good budget year being defined as a $6 billion deficit instead of a $24 billion one).

One reason is that transportation dollars for local roads comes from an 18 cents a gallon gas tax, and that gas tax amount has not increased over time for inflation, gradually reducing the amount available for road maintenance.

There is also the regular sales tax on gasoline, a small portion of which is supposed to go to local governments, called Prop 42 money after the proposition that mandated that it only be used for transportation.

The problem here is that neither of those two together are nearly enough to even do maintenance, and nothing has ever been done about it. On top of that the state is contemplating taking ALL of it to balance the budget. Our road departments will be devastated if that happens.

Despite the fact that we know that there is not enough money to fix the roads, local governments do not plan and take money out of other funds to make up for the above mentioned lack of funds. And remember, this is an ongoing problem that is there whether we are in state budget trouble or not.

Bill Dodd, to his credit, tried to fix this for the entire county by proposing a new local sales tax to pay for it. At this point, however, new local taxes are an obvious non starter.

The thing that is never contemplated that maybe we ought to start thinking about is cutting the budget elsewhere and shift the money over to fix the roads. The County added nearly $2 million out of the general fund last year to help out, but with the current budget crisis that could not be continued.

And it isn’t nearly enough anyway, we really need about $10 million a year more in the county, the same in the city of Napa. St. Helena has a woeful $112,000 roads budget this year, about enough to fix a couple of driveways.

Part of the reason we don’t shift other monies over is that it would in a sense be letting the state off the hook for having shirked its responsibility. The other part is that the whole system is in a routine, streams of money and where they flow are very ordered and the state and counties and cities are locked into an organizational structure that does not easily allow changes.

Where would you get the money? Every department has its budget plus increases locked down every year and you would have to cut something. If you follow my writing you know where I would look, to employee compensation which I think has gotten too high. Due to the fact that it is all locked down in union contracts and expectations of maintaining the same levels that other local governments pay, it is going to take a real fight to change the system.

But how long can we really keep swerving around this? Most think that the state has to do something, but the state is in so much trouble that no matter what happens with the economy it will be years before the state is solvent again. It is time to think about more than putting a patch on the roads, and allocating more local resources to improve them.

 

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