Auctioning off roads is dead end for Florida

Leasing public roads to private entrepreneurs has been billed as a form of financial innovation, but the business plans presented so far to Gov. Charlie Crist tell a different tale. This is all about raising tolls and giving Wall Street a piece of the action, and it plays Florida motorists for patsies.

For Tampa Bay motorists, here is but one of the offers: Lease the Sunshine Skyway Bridge to a company that would in turn raise the toll fivefold, from $1 to $5. Never mind that the current toll provides more than enough each year to maintain the 20-year-old span.

The lure is that investors might pay the state $1.3-billion for the right to control toll revenues for 50 years, but this is like borrowing from loan sharks. The state can raise the tolls any time it wants and borrow money to be repaid by the higher tolls. Letting a company be the middleman only adds a layer of profit, a higher loan rate, and a loss of control. Given the recent bridge collapse in Minnesota, is Florida really ready to cede maintenance to a company that might profit by cutting corners?

Tolls already are among the least efficient ways to collect money for road construction, given that the transaction usually takes place in the middle of an otherwise open roadway and often involves a collection attendant. The best argument for their use, which is that they represent the ultimate user fee, is undermined by the notion that drivers on one toll road would be paying for construction of a different road. Crist, even has hinted he might go a step further and use some of the money for education or social services.

If the point is to find a way to meet the growing backlog of road construction, Crist and lawmakers need to drop the pretense that they lack any viable alternative. First, they can stop pulling more than $200-million a year out of the transportation trust fund to pay for other state services. Then, they can turn to one of the most widely accepted user fees in the nation: the gas tax.

Florida has taxed fuel for 86 years, but it has seldom kept pace with inflation. In recent years, lawmakers indexed the tax only to the rate of general inflation, not to the actual cost of gasoline. As a result, the state can't keep up with transportation demand or the soaring cost of road construction.

The easiest fix, as some state transportation advocates have noted, is the same one that President Reagan used in 1982 when he increased the federal gas tax by 5 cents. "The cost to the average motorist will be small," he wrote then, "but the benefit to our transportation system will be immense."

Unfortunately, a political generation later, the conservatives who align themselves with Reagan distance themselves from his more practical instincts. They no longer consider the gas tax an efficient user fee. It is branded, like taxes on income and capital gains and estates, as a form of government confiscation to be fought at every turn.

In Florida, this translates into a governor and legislature actually entertaining the idea of auctioning off the public's roads. They need to reconsider the long-term consequences before they fall for the easy money.

[Last modified November 30, 2007, 09:17:22]