Do Illinois roads need more money?

Jim Nowlan

The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) is beating the drums for an increase in either the gas tax or the vehicle registration fee. Otherwise, officials say, the backlog of bad highways and bridges will grow, and construction of new roads in growing suburbs will come to a halt.

So I surveyed my own Toulon Lions Club (in rural central Illinois) on the topic, a tough but fair audience. Most of the 30 fellows at the meeting said that Illinois highways and roads were in fair shape overall; only one said "poor" but only one gave a "good" grade; nobody said excellent.

Two out of three were willing to pay more for highways so long as they could see improvement as a result. A registration fee increase was preferred over a boost in the gas tax.

Illinois is blessed with one of the richest transportation networks in the world. The state has 2,200 miles of interstate highways, radiating out from metro-Chicago and across southern Illinois, more than any other state but California and Texas, which dwarf Illinois in area. As part of the Northwest Territory, our state was laid out in 36-square mile, checkerboard townships, with roads cross-hatching every mile, a feature states outside the Midwest lack.

Illinois was one of the first states to pull itself out of the mud. In the 1920s, Gov. Len Small of Kankakee broke national road-building records almost every year. He threatened a state takeover of highway construction from private contractors, who grudgingly reduced their bids from around $40,000 a mile to $27,000.

This early road building was done to rather primitive standards, with narrow lanes and bridges, and poor vertical and horizontal site alignments. The old roadbeds have been expensive to upgrade, and continue to be costly to keep up.

Ever since completing the marvelous interstate system, the federal government has been cutting back on its share of road funding. (The feds paid 90 percent of construction costs, but support only half the maintenance expenses for the I-ways.) And to balance the national budget by 2002, federal funds to the state will go down 14 percent between now and that year, according to state officials.

In the meantime, state taxes and fees have been going up. As a legislator in 1969, I voted to increase the state gas tax to 7.5 cents a gallon. In the 1980s this tax went up every other year, to its present 19.3 cents a gallon (about 26 cents when the sales tax is figured in). Diesel fuel is another 2 1/2 cents higher, much more than in all neighboring states with the exception of Indiana. My over-the-road trucker friends say they buy fuel outside the state whenever they can.

The passenger vehicle registration fee went from $18 in 1984 to $48 two years later, where it has remained since.

Both the state gas tax and registration fee are in the upper ranges among the states, although IDOT will point out that many states have onerous local property taxes on autos, which Illinois eliminated years ago, and that in the past couple of years many states have set gas tax increases in motion.

Illinois road builders appear to charge more for their work than is the case elsewhere. Based upon an annual analysis by the Federal Highway Administration of road contract prices across the nation, Illinois paid more in 1995 than the national average for excavation, concrete, asphalt, reinforcing steel, structural steel and structural concrete. This

Jim Nowlan, 54, is a former Illinois legislator and state agency director who lives on a "farmette" south of Toulon in Stark County. He is a senior fellow at the University of Illinois Institute of Governmental Affairs and an adjunct professor of public policy at Knox College. He is the author of several books. His homepage, with links to many public policy sites, is at: jim.nowlan.nidus.net.

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was also true in most of these categories when Illinois prices were compared with those in nearby states.

Good transportation is critical to the Illinois economy and to travel safety, so if user costs have to go up for these purposes, so be it. In this context, I recommend the following:

1. An increase in the vehicle registration fee is preferable to a gas tax increase. The latter would hurt gas sales along our borders. The fee should be indexed to inflation, so revenues grow with costs.

2. Lawmakers should direct the state Auditor General to conduct a thorough and comparative cost-benefit analysis of road-building costs in Illinois, which to my knowledge has never been done. (Editors note: The Legislative Audit Commission, a liason to the Auditor General, recently did order such an audit, to be conducted next summer.) This would either reassure taxpayers that they are getting good bang for their buck or indicate that we must do business more efficiently.

3. Through a complex formula, local governments automatically receive a share of increased revenues. In west-central Illinois, county blacktops generally appear to be in better shape than the state highways. Old state highways that have been supplanted by newer routes should be evaluated for transfer to county responsibility.

4. Economists should model trucking company behavior to determine if a reduction in the diesel fuel tax might actually increase state revenues from truckers who would buy more fuel in Illinois if the total price were competitive.

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