David Stockman, who served as Ronald Reagan’s
high-profile budget director, spends quite a bit of time these days writing a
blog that proudly displays a contrarian view.

One of Stockman’s posts dating back to April 2014 served
as an attempt to stop in its tracks the talk in Washington about the need for
infrastructure projects, particularly those designed to fix crumbling roads and
bridges.
A former congressman from Michigan, Stockman makes the case that transportation
system statistics are presented in a skewed manner by government officials,
with help from a team of road industry lobbyists.

As Michiganians prepare to vote on an increase in the
sales tax to 7 percent for roads, a key factor to consider is that Gov. Rick
Snyder and his transportation team are unable to target those funds solely to priority
areas where busily traveled roads and bridges present safety and commerce
concerns (more on that later).

Stockman recalled a story about his old boss, describing how President Reagan was “hoodwinked” into supporting a federal gas tax hike in
1982:

“During the long trauma of the 1981-1982
recession the Reagan administration had stoutly resisted the
temptation to implement a Keynesian-style fiscal stimulus and jobs program
— notwithstanding an unemployment rate that peaked in double digits,” he wrote
on his site, Contra Corner. “But within just a few months of the bottom, along
came a Republican Secretary of Transportation, Drew Lewis, with a presidential
briefing on the alleged disrepair of the nation’s highways and bridges. The
briefing was accompanied by a Cabinet Room full of easels bearing pictures
of dilapidated bridges and roads and a plan to dramatically increase
highway spending and the gas tax.


Stockman

“Not surprisingly, DOT Secretary Lewis was a former
governor and the top GOP fundraiser of the era. So the Cabinet Room was soon
figuratively surrounded by a muscular coalition of road builders,
construction machinery suppliers, asphalt and concrete vendors, governors,
mayors and legislators and the AFL-CIO building trades department. And if
that wasn’t enough, Lewis had also made deals to line up the highway
safety and beautification lobby, bicycle enthusiasts and all the motley
array of mass transit interest groups.

“They were all singing from the same crumbling
infrastructure playbook. … ‘The Gipper’ soon joined the crowd. ‘No,
we are opposed to wasteful borrow and spend,’ he (said). ‘That’s how we got
into this mess. But these projects are different. Roads and bridges are a
proper responsibility of government, and they have already been paid for by the
gas tax.’

“By the time a pork-laden highway bill was rammed
through a lame duck session of Congress in December 1982, Reagan too had bought
on to the crumbling infrastructure gambit. Explaining why he signed the bill,
the scourge of Big Government noted, ‘We have 23,000 bridges in need of
replacement or rehabilitation; 40 percent of our bridges are over 40 years old.’”

But those numbers, according to the former White House numbers
guru, were a sham.

A U.S. problem, or
a Calif. problem?

Gov. Snyder, the Michigan road builders association and transportation
officials across the state would certainly argue that Stockman’s remarks are
irrelevant to the approaching road tax proposal on the May 5 statewide ballot.

No one would argue that Michigan’s roads and bridges remain
in decent shape after two decades of neglect by the state Legislature. Our
state clearly suffers from a large number of “structurally deficient”
thoroughfares for motorists to navigate. But we come in at No. 17 among the 50 states in the percentage of our bridges that are defective — not in the Top 5 or Top 10.

A few basic charts and graphs created by the American  Road and Transportation Builders Association, relying upon federal government
data from 2013, puts things in perspective.
 

For example, an ARTBA ranking of the most heavily
traveled structurally deficient bridges – meaning they are in need of repair or
replacement – shows that Michigan’s most worrisome span comes in at No. 161.
That designation is for a bridge at I-94 and Second Street in Detroit, which
is a relatively young structure, built in 1971. Many of the bridges on the Top
250 list date back 60 years or more.
But here’s what jumps off the chart: 65 of the 75
busiest bridges at the top of the list are located in California, in the urban
areas of southern California and San Francisco.

Stockman concludes that, at a time when an increase in
the federal gas tax is under discussion by some Democrats on Capitol Hill,
Washington should realize that heavily traveled, aging bridges are mostly a California
problem, not a United States problem. He goes further by arguing that Gov.
Jerry Brown created the Golden State’s transportation woes by spending huge
sums to shore up financially wracked pension systems for government workers
rather than tending to infrastructure.

An ARTBA map shows what’s really happening out there on
America’s roadways. While California dominates the category of congested, dilapidated
bridges, about one-third of the United States’ hazardous spans are located in
six rural states in the nation’s mid-section: Iowa, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas,
Nebraska and South Dakota.

Rural vs. urban

These states account for just 5.9 percent of the nation’s
population and they have 118,000 bridges overall. That is, one bridge for every
160 people. To offer a parallel to that 160 figure (admittedly a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison), the busiest
bridge on the nation’s deficient list is a structure in Orange County, Calif.,
that carries 324,000 vehicles a day.

Among those six states with a bad bridge track record,
the location with the most bridges is Iowa – nearly 25,000, or one for every
125 people. The fact that Iowa is the most important state during the
presidential primary season, the nation’s capital of political pandering, makes
me wonder if the infrastructure issue is presented in a misleading way because
of the manner in which the Hawkeye State’s numbers can be manipulated.

Here’s where Stockman pours on the snark thicker than a
tarry patch plopped into a pothole:

“…Suddenly the picture is crystal clear. These are
not the kind of bridges that thousands of cars and heavy duty trucks pass
over each day. No, they are mainly the kind Clint Eastwood needed a local
farm-wife to locate (in the movie “The Bridges of Madison County”) so he could take pictures for a
National Geographic spread on covered bridges.

“Stated differently, the overwhelming bulk of the 600,000
so-called ‘bridges’ in America are so little used that they are more often
crossed by dogs, cows, cats and tractors than they are by passenger (car)
motorists.  They are essentially no different than local playgrounds and
municipal parks. They have nothing to do with interstate commerce, GDP growth
or national public infrastructure.”

Michigan tax plan
flaw

Stockman’s heavily detailed blog post takes a look at the
big picture regarding federal gas tax money, but it tacitly leads to a major
flaw in the sales tax plan that was put on the Michigan ballot by the
Legislature and has received outspoken support from the governor.

The $1.2 billion in revenue generated by the one penny
tax sales tax hike (a 17 percent increase) and other provisions in Proposal 1
would not be fully prioritized. Essentially, the money flows into a fund
created by a 64-year-old state law, Act 51, that spreads around the cash in a way
that critics say disproportionately favors rural counties over urban and suburban
cities.

Keeping the focus on bridges, as Stockman does – potholes
are aggravating, but rickety bridges are scary – the vast majority of Michigan’s
bridges in fair or poor condition are located in a few areas: southeast
Michigan, Flint-Bay City-Saginaw and Grand Rapids. But those locations and
others like them won’t receive most of the Proposal 1 transportation funds
because the Act 51 funding formula does not place a great emphasis on vehicle
traffic carried by roads and bridges in cities.

According to the state Transportation Asset Management Council, in the tri-county area Wayne County has about 60 bridges rated in poor
condition; Oakland County has nearly 30; and Macomb, one of the smallest
Michigan counties from a geographic standpoint, has more than 40.

In contrast, some northern Michigan counties have no
bridges in poor condition.  Other rural locations
that certainly would not be categorized as barren have few poor bridges:
Kalkaska County, four; Alpena County, two; Charlevoix County, one.



Gov. Snyder is the tax plan’s chief cheerleader

Obviously, none of those bridges carries even a small
fraction of the daily traffic that passes over the structures in Metro
Detroit, especially during rush hour. But Act 51 provides a majority of bridge
money to state trunklines, and in many rural counties those state highways are
the only thoroughfares that handle more than a minimal amount of vehicles and suffer subsequent wear and tear.

Funding formula
bias

The rural bias built into the Act 51 distribution formula has
generated countless debates in the Legislature without producing any reforms,
though the law dates back to a time when Michigan’s suburbs were still farmland
and many of the interstate highways were not yet built.

State Rep. Tony Forlini, a Republican from Macomb County’s
Harrison Township, tried without success to secure an amendment to the road tax
plan that would have tilted the new Proposal 1 revenue more towards heavily populated southeast
Michigan.
Perhaps Act 51 can be revisited by the governor and lawmakers if Proposal 1 passes.

Stockman’s comprehensive blog brings mounds of transportation system data full circle by
questioning why rural areas comprise such a large part of the nation’s funding
formula when they are such a small part of the nation’s population. One in five
of Iowa’s 25,000 bridges are deficient, but with low traffic counts on most of
those crumbling bridges, he asks, why is that a national issue? If one-fifth of
Iowa’s bridges present a public safety hazard, why don’t Iowans take care of
that problem?

What’s more, the 19,000 neglected bridges in the six
states singled out by Stockman somehow equal the number of substandard bridges in
35 other states combined – including large states like Florida, Texas, New
Jersey, Massachusetts and Michigan. Yet, these states have a combined
population of 175 million, compared to 19 million in the six rural states, and
more than 600 people per bridge, as opposed to 125 in Iowa. (In Massachusetts
the figure is more than 10 times Iowa’s level — 1,300 people per bridge.)

One salient fact – a nagging political reality – rises above any
discussion on these matters. If the Michigan road tax formula was amended, if it was made fairer and
most of the Proposal 1 money went to priority areas with busy but
deficient bridges, the folks in places like Alpena and Charlevoix would ask a
simple question: Why should they pay more taxes to finance bridge repairs in
places like Genesee and Wayne counties?