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Financial planning from truckers Saturday, Nov 12, 2005 By John Brummett At first glance, it baffles that truckers would come out against a way to raise more than a half-billion dollars for interstate highway improvement that would ask not one additional cent from them. Why, that sounds like the very pavement-for-free world the tractor-trailer community has long dreamed of. Only on second glance, extended for study and a couple of phone calls, can one begin to see that this has very little to do with what meets the eye. Instead it has much to do with this old resentment truckers harbor against the state Highway Commission's constitutionally bestowed independence from, and power over, not only the private sector, but the rest of state government. That constitutional status translates into near immunity for our highway bosses from the common political pressure organizations like the Arkansas Trucking Association can bring to bear. It can hamper a special interest's purchase of legislative friendships when public highway commissioners can trump those by arbitrarily plopping down new highways here and there, or, perhaps more to the point, denying new highways here and there. To give the already powerfully insulated Highway Commission authority to maintain a $575 million line of credit ad infinitum for projects wholly left to the future discretion of the commission - which is what Gov. Mike Huckabee proposes for a special election Dec. 13 - has the big truck lobby flailing for the air brakes. A brief history of modern Arkansas might be helpful. In 1952, after an overblown highway "scandal" in the McMath administration, Arkansas adopted the Mack-Blackwell Amendment. It provided that we'd have five highway commissioners who would be appointed to 10-year terms by the governor, and that these commissioners would then be subservient to no one - not any governor, not any legislator - in building and maintaining our highway system. Once possessed of this rare constitutional power, the Highway Department came under the leadership of people who knew how to use it. The late Henry Gray, aka King Henry, for example. He, as director, and his highway commissioners leveraged the Legislature to hold out longer than any other state on acquiescing to 80,000-pound load limits for big trucks. For the longest, Arkansas was a weight-reduction island that rejected participation in interstate registration plans coordinating all truck taxes, but insisted on imposing its own brand of truck taxes based on weight carried and distance traveled. In 1999, Huckabee got persuaded by former Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt, head of a citizens committee the governor appointed to find ways to pay for highway improvements, that the only way to rebuild our horrid interstate highways - perhaps the very worst in the country - was to take advantage of relatively new federal authority to sell bonds based on paybacks to be made from federal highway turnback to flow in future years. The Highway Commission embraced the plan and the Trucking Association endorsed it, including a 4-cent diesel fuel tax increase. But the industry did so only after griping that the interstates were dilapidated because the Highway Commission had abused its independence by spreading political favors on rural lanes rather than concentrating funds where actual traffic flowed. The bond plan passed. Interest rates were good. The freeways are improved. Soon we will be in a position to refinance, depending on what the voters say Dec. 13. In 2003, the Trucking Association tried and failed to persuade the Legislature to refer a constitutional amendment changing the Mack-Blackwell Amendment. Now come Huckabee and the Highway Commissioners to ask voters to grant what amounts to a permanent line of credit capped at $575 million by which the Highway Commission could incur debt to make improvements of its choosing at any time. Truckers behold what they once would have deemed a physical impossibility - even greater insulated power for the Highway Commission. They've decided there's no such thing as free pavement. They've said "no." They've presumed to do the rest of us the courtesy of explaining the perils of perpetual debt on a depreciating product. Their point is worth contemplating on merit, even if truckers offer it only tactically, as a feint. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
