Bad news for the roads since the amendment specifies a set percentage of funds to mass transit. This amendment needs to be killed.

Laurie Blake, while understandably an advocate for any and all kinds of transportation, gives very little weight to the worst part of this amendment. The ratio of funding limits, the 'awkward wording' she mentions: Of a 100% of funding, a MAXIMUM of 60% goes to roads, while a MINIMUM of 40% goes to mass transit. That means that it is possible for all 100% to go to mass transit, and 0 to roads. And you know that there are plenty of people who want it that way.

Loren is correct. This thing is horrible for the 98% of the state population that depend on pavement.

It is even worse than that. Right now, 52% of the MVST goes to roads and the other 48% goes into the general fund. Let us take the deceptively worded amendment at face value for a moment and assume that the legislature DOES start spending 60% of the MVST on roads (five years from now, as the actual amendment is written). So the best we can expect out of this amendment is that another 8% of the money would be going to roads. That's not going to buy a whole lot of road work.

But the other thing that's going to happen is that 40% of the money now going to the general fund is going to have to go to transit, meaning that the money that now gets spent on education, welfare, AND ROADS must either be funded through some other revenue source or cut out of the budget. Since the legislature will say that they now have "dedicated funding" for roads, the highway money now coming out of the general fund will be most likely cut and we will end up with LESS money for roads than we do now!

Please, get the word out. This amendment needs to be defeated!

Hi All!

For a most excellent dissertation on the what the Strib would have us believe is a Roads and Bridges vote, check out this post on the least read blog in MOBdom :-(

http://wogsblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/why-is-wog-against-jobs.html

Nice site!
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