Commentary: Bad roads ahead and I-976 isn’t (entirely) to blame

By Will Knedlik / For The Herald

The care for and functionality of state and local bridges, highways, roads and streets have declined, for at least 35 years, throughout Washington state — primarily for lack of funding adequate to preserve and to maintain that high-cost and higher-value infrastructure in “good repair” status — and severe consequences for the state economy and for all state motorists have escalated during this decade.

Opposition to Tim Eyman’s latest $30 car-tab initiative by several leading newspapers, and costly advertising campaigns to defeat Initiative 976, focused on reductions to be inflicted upon roadways already on “a glidepath to failure” (in the state’s quite evocative terminology introduced recently).

Indeed, if silver linings abide within that current threat to funding essential for road conservation, statewide, then one key benefit would derive from journalists, commerce, labor and other groups each recognizing, now, the importance of immense roadway investments made through user fees.

Having been approved by voters, if I-976 survives a court challenge, the pivotal state Motor Vehicle Fund would annually receive $70 million less, “exclusively for highway purposes,” as constitutionally guaranteed. While that loss certainly is nontrivial, it would be little more than a minor rounding error next to the massive underfunding of roadways by state, county and city governments across decades. This reality merits thoughtful attention from highly influential organizations publicly expressing angst over “bad roads” today.

After a near total failure of the Northport Bridge over the Columbia River on the Canadian border, in 2016, and after large chunks of the Umatilla Bridge fell into that waterway’s Oregon boundary, within days, our state’s chief transportation engineer squarely identified to the Washington State Good Roads and Transportation Association’s 119th annual conference, in 2017, that “we have infrastructure that is crumbling under our feet now.” Its transportation secretary commenced, in 2018, quantifying truly gargantuan underfunding for state roadways’ urgent preservation and maintenance deficiencies, for the 65th Legislature, at $550 million per year then.

Presentations to the 120th annual conference by experts in county-road and city-street finances, thereafter, indicated that local under-investments — for protecting county-and-city roadways — are both as great as underfunding for the state highway system, if not larger.

Preliminary but professional estimates of combined annual shortages were, thus, $1.65 billion.

This January, the transportation secretary courageously updated the newly elected 66th Legislature with further assessments identifying under-investment, at the state level, to be nearly $700 million per year, but, once again, without specifying the point when financing sufficient for “good repair” was abandoned, and when “a glidepath to failure” had therewith begun.

In September, the Joint Legislative and Review Committee issued its report criticizing the state’s devolving cost estimations — for protecting motorists’ enormous bridge expenditures — as “incomplete,” “out of date” and having “not acknowledged these limitations,” and it, therefore, suggested that “Stakeholders may have an unrealistically low impression of long terms costs” to underwrite the state’s complete “bridge rreservation needs.”

Research prior to this month’s 121st annual conference implicates a starting point for deficient state revenues for “good repair,” in the 1980s, and expanding state irresponsibility from marginal underfunding, initially, to massive deficiencies, in 2019, when revenues for state highway system upkeep were reduced so drastically that our state is, presently, slicing previous hiring levels for essential snowplow operators and praying for balmy winter temperatures.

If the state highway system’s backlog of decadally underfunded preservation and maintenance costs are calculated using its likely understated current projection of $700 million annually, and if its resulting funding-shortfall growth is projected in equal increments from zero in 1983 to $700 million in 2019, then cumulatively imprudent under-investment — for responsibly protecting motorist-financed state infrastructure — would be $12.6 billion (stated in current dollars).

If county roads and city streets have been similarly abused, then the overall number would triple with total accumulated underfunding approaching $38 billion.

However, gigantic fiscal burdens to be largely shifted to future generations are fivefold greater, using normal rule-of-thumb projections for replacing failed infrastructure, prematurely, because of mindless lack of prudent conservation.

This would raise direct costs to $189 billion — exclusive of economic damage to state citizens — after hefty fuel taxes paid since 1921, for nearly a century, and after needless spending of $656 more on each vehicle, every year, for repairs from state-and-local bridges, highways, roads and streets, so long neglected, descending now from present “crumbling” toward actual collapse.

These are recklessly improvident liabilities — for a state of just 8 million souls — that can no longer be casually ignored: since nearly 6 million state motorists bump over already degraded infrastructure daily; since multimodal transportation for all people, for all freight, distribution and delivery of products, for all school buses and for all emergency, fire and police services, inter alia, rely upon roadways for virtually every trip, including for public transit and for non-motorized and partially motorized vehicles; and since our state’s current-and-future economic prosperity rests on roadway functionality for evolving commerce, including fundamentally road-dependent innovations by Amazon, Lyft, Uber, Waymo and other paradigm-shifting businesses.

Will Knedlik is president of the Washington State Good Roads and Transportation Association and a former state representative. A Democrat, he previously chaired the Revenue Resources Subcommittee in the House. He also has taught at the University of Washington and Harvard University.