Continued: Steve Elkins: Arguments against the override -- debunked

In fact, all revenue from state gas taxes and tab fees are dedicated to roads and bridges in Article 14 of the state Constitution. You can look it up. None of it has ever been spent on anything else, not even transit.

We have yet to hear what those lower priorities are. The lion's share of the state general fund is spent on education, health care and justice. If you think that revenue should be diverted from other programs, tell us what you would cut. Should we have higher class sizes? Higher college tuitions? More families without health insurance? Fewer prison guards? Please, tell us.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty now has an opportunity to tell us what he thinks should be cut to close a projected billion-dollar gap in the state budget. The choices will be painful. As you read the governor's proposal, try to imagine the sacrifices that would be required to carve an additional $6.6 billion from the current state budget to fund the transportation infrastructure that will be financed by the new transportation-finance law.

Besides, transportation is a public utility that should be financed by its users. When I was a Republican, "user pays" was a guiding principle.

As MnDOT commissioner, Carol Molnau consistently told lawmakers that there was no need to raise the gas tax because there would be plenty of money to spend on new roads and bridges once she rooted out all of the waste, fraud and abuse in her own agency. So far, the only thing that's been cut from the MnDOT budget is the maintenance of our roads and bridges.

Rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in state government is, in fact, the responsibility of the governing administration. We're now five years into the Pawlenty administration. If there are still billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse waiting to be rooted out, the governor should be able to tell us where it is and what he's doing to eliminate it -- and this would be a good week for him to be forthcoming with this information.

Bonds no more represent new funds than your own Visa card does. Both have to be paid off with real money. States such as New Jersey, Virginia and New Mexico that relied heavily on bonding to finance their last wave of transportation infrastructure construction now find that all of their gas-tax money is being spent on road maintenance and debt service -- there is none left over to finance additional construction, even though these states continue to face pressing needs for additional transportation infrastructure. We don't want to find ourselves in their position.

In order to maintain the state's AAA bond rating, general obligation bonding is limited to the amount that can be financed with 3 percent of general-fund revenues. Transportation bonding should be governed by the same investment principles.

The new transportation funding law includes both significant new transportation bonding and the new gas-tax revenues needed to pay off those bonds. This is the responsible approach to bonding.

MnDOT itself estimates that we will need an additional $20 billion to close our transportation infrastructure funding gap over the next decade. The bill proposed at the beginning of the session would have provided almost half a loaf, $8.8 billion. The bill that was actually passed will provide $6.6 billion -- about a third of a loaf.

By postponing action year after year, we've dug ourselves an enormous hole -- it was time to stop digging it deeper.

A few years ago the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies analyzed the transportation expenditures of Twin Cities families and discovered that taxes collected to finance the public cost of transportation (roads, licensing, car registration, etc.) represent less than 10 percent of the typical family's transportation expenses. Private expenditures on such things as car payments, insurance and fuel (not to mention the significant value of travel time) take most of the rest. This raises the question: Are dollars spent on the deluxe option package for the new family car really more wisely spent than dollars spent on investments in government-provided transportation infrastructure that allow parents to spend an additional half-hour at home with their children?

When it comes right down to it, this is the judgment that our legislators were asked to make. Over two-thirds of them made the wise choice.

Steve Elkins is a City Council member in Bloomington and a participant in a number of transportation advocacy organizations.