Lots of good-paying jobs are falling victim in Kansas’s “March to zero” — Gov. Sam Brownback’s plan to eliminate the state income tax.
Not the least are positions with road and bridge construction.
Typically, the state schedules 1,200 miles of road construction a year. For 2016, only 200 miles are scheduled to be repaired, according to the Kansas Contractors Association that represents road construction firms and laborers.
As for the state’s 25,000 bridges, normally 115 are scheduled for maintenance. This year, about half that amount — 58 — are on the roster.
Just last week, Gov. Brownback announced another round of cuts. Put on the back burner was $552,000 worth of proposed projects, including $139,000 targeted for our 14-county region in southeast Kansas.
Such cutbacks mean a lot of lost jobs, not to mention a setback in road and bridge maintenance.
We won’t begin to notice the effects on state roads for about two years, said Bob Totten, executive vice president for the KCA. But in the not-too-distant future, Kansas will be in league with Missouri and Oklahoma, whose reputations for bad roads are legion.
Totten addressed members of the Kansas Press Association last weekend at its annual convention.
“T-Works is dead,” Totten said, referring to the 10-year transportation program that was passed in 2010 at a cost of $8 billion.
Even before Brownback became governor the transportation department had been referred to as the “Bank of KDOT” because of its deep pockets due to successive funding initiatives. In the last six years, those pockets have been picked clean with more than $2.5 billion in KDOT funds used to address revenue shortfalls in the general fund.
What also hurts is that KDOT can’t take advantage of the low cost of oil.
This is an exceptionally good time to make hay in road repairs, Totten said. The cost of goods will never get cheaper.
RUBBING SALT into the wound is that all this chaos is self-inflicted. Had Kansas not lowered its income tax tiers or allowed businesses to escape paying taxes altogether, our budgets would be balanced, and programs such as T-Works would be funded.
It’s not a dead-end road, you know.
