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The Sacramento Bee, Calif., Dan Walters Column: Highway Program Moves Ever Closer to Pork Barrel Politics

Posted on: Monday, 27 February 2006, 15:00 CST

By Dan Walters, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Feb. 27--Anyone who's familiar with private land development and public transportation construction knows that the two are intrinsically connected and their symbiosis creates greater potential for political chicanery.

As California embarked on its massive and historic expansion of its highway system after World War II, it wisely maintained layers of political insulation on where and when the projects could be built. Gasoline taxes, the primary source of construction funds, were held in a special, constitutionally created fund that could not be tapped for other purposes. And while politicians could press for particular projects, and often did, final decisions on which were built were largely left to professional highway engineers and the State Highway Commission.

It was not a perfect system, of course, but in the main it served California well for decades - until it began to fall apart in the mid-1970s as a new governor, Jerry Brown, came into office. Although his administration laid off thousands of Department of Transportation employees, froze project funds and centralized final decisions on construction contracts in Sacramento, Brown occasionally dangled specific highway projects in front of legislators to entice votes on other matters.

During the post-Brown years, highway construction continued to lag for a variety of political and financial reasons, even as traffic congestion grew worse. But as the 20th century became the 21st, public angst on transportation mounted, and when the state experienced a brief injection of personal income tax revenues, then-Gov. Gray Davis (who had been Brown's chief of staff) declared that he wanted to divert some of the money into transportation under the rubric of "congestion relief." But, in an almost complete break with the past, the Governor's Office devised the list of projects, completely disconnected from the usual planning process.

It soon became evident that many of Davis' projects were a priority only to him and - by sheer coincidence, he and his aides insisted - appeared to enhance the fortunes of those who had contributed to his re-election campaign. One example: a freeway interchange on Interstate 10 in the California desert to funnel traffic into an Indian tribe's casino. Another: enhanced subsidies for a defunct railroad on the North Coast.

As it happened, little of the "congestion relief" account was ever spent because the state almost immediately found itself in a budget crisis. Davis' successor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is now floating his own transportation scheme, largely financed by bonds and centered on highways, and he's following the same suspect model that Davis pursued: designating in the Governor's Office the projects to be built, apparently in the belief that it would help Schwarzenegger build political support for the plan.

He's been crisscrossing the state, touting specific projects that would be built.

As it happens, the new federal transportation program also moves down the road toward pork-barreling highway construction. Much of the money set aside for California in the new transportation bill has been "earmarked" for more than 500 specific projects favored by influential California members of Congress. Sparsely populated Kern County, for example, would be saturated with new road projects, thanks to having local Rep. Bill Thomas chair the House Ways and Means Committee.

Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill, in her analysis of Schwarzenegger's budget last week, strongly criticized both federal and state earmarking, and it's one of the many unsettled issues surrounding Schwarzenegger's infrastructure proposal. Those whose pet highway projects were not on the governor's list are pushing back, and lest it evolve into a dog-eat-dog competition for allocations - in other words, an exercise in pure political pork - there is now a quiet campaign to eliminate the specific projects and give money, in broad categories, to state transportation authorities for allocation by application.

No matter what happens on the governor's package, we'll still have much less money than we need to maintain and expand the state's highway network. And whatever is spent should be prioritized strictly on need, not political pull.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

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Source: The Sacramento Bee

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