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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe Indiana General Assembly’s tug-of-war over road funding offers a good lesson—and a grab bag of politics at its worst.
Start with the short-term thinking on display by Gov. Mike Pence and Senate Republicans, who are determined to avoid any kind of tax increase in an election year. Tax increases to raise money for stadiums and other luxuries are inherently controversial. Funding for basic infrastructure, like roads, shouldn’t be.
But with both eyes on November rather than what’s best for Indiana in the long run, the governor and his supporters are sticking with a four-year road plan that relies on government reserves and bond proceeds.
House Republicans, to their credit, are taking a longer view. Led by House Speaker Brian Bosma, they’ve proposed something almost unheard of among modern-day Republicans: raising taxes. Their 10-year plan would raise money by increasing the cigarette tax and indexing the gas tax to inflation. The House plan also would allow local governments to raise additional infrastructure money by adopting new taxes—a welcome idea from a Legislature that seems increasingly hostile to home rule.
The House bill passed and went to the Senate, which stripped it of its key provisions. Denied by the Senate, the House Ways and Means Committee responded with a classic, yet distasteful, political maneuver: co-mingling unrelated issues to get what it wants. It added the road-funding provisions favored by the House to a Senate bill that OK’d a one-time cost-of-living adjustment for state pensioners.
They also used the bill to tie road-funding to one of Gov. Pence’s top priorities: additional funding for his Regional Cities initiative.
The Legislature last year approved $84 million, to be raised from a state tax amnesty program, for Regional Cities, the governor’s plan to fund quality-of-life improvement projects in two city-anchored regions. But after a statewide competition, the governor late last year chose three proposals, which meant getting legislative approval this year for an extra $42 million in Regional Cities funding.
Using Regional Cities and the pension adjustment as bargaining chips in the road-funding battle isn’t ideal, but the governor’s hard line against tax increases, even for something as basic as infrastructure, left the House with few options.
It’s refreshing to see Bosma and others in the House go to the mat for something truly important. Too many Indiana roads and bridges are in disrepair thanks to the Legislature’s reluctance in recent years to hammer out a long-term road-funding plan.
Forcing the governor’s hand on road funding remains a long shot, but we admire the effort. With the entire House and half the Senate up for reelection every two years, our governor and legislators need to start thinking beyond the next election.•
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