Chafee’s Budget: Overhauls Transportation Funding
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Governor Chafee called for an end to borrowing money to build and maintain state roads and bridges—saying the current system is broken.
“The number of potholes and closed bridges in our state demonstrates that we need more funding for transportation, but the options are not easy,” Chafee said. “Rhode Island has one of the highest gas tax rates in the country, and we cannot raise it any higher. Instead, we must break our habit of borrowing money to build roads.”
In the current year alone, he said the state is spending $43.6 million on debt for transportation projects—money, he said, that could have been spent on repaving roads and strengthening bridges.
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“To fix this problem, I propose a five-year plan to dedicate the revenue we get from driver’s license, registration and title fees toward a transportation infrastructure plan,” Chafee said. “By making incremental additions to this fund over time, we can diversity our transportation funding sources, avoid increases in the gas tax and reduce our wasteful interest payments.”
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