Commentary: Straight Talk with Sam

U.S. Rep. Sam Graves R-Missouri

Dear Friend,

Government does two things well: nothing and overreact.

The first is a big part of the reason why our infrastructure is crumbling. You can’t hardly drive anywhere without slamming a bone-shattering pothole, getting stuck in awful traffic or creeping across a weight-restricted bridge. How is it that we live in the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, but the roads we take to work, to school or anywhere else are crumbling and not keeping up with our growing communities or innovation?

The Highway Trust Fund and the gas tax were based on a fair and commonsense principle — if you use our roads, you should pay to maintain them. One of the problems is that, in recent years, millions of electric vehicles have taken to the road in the U.S., while paying nothing into the federal highway trust fund to maintain our roads. As a result, states and communities are getting fewer dollars to fix roads and bridges.

The other part of the problem, of course, is the overreacting. Instead of passing commonsense guidelines to ensure road and bridge projects put communities’ best interests in mind, we got an incoherent mess of bureaucratic red tape that causes unnecessary delays. That’s why, today, it takes an average of 7 years (and often longer) to complete a major highway project, and even then, these projects usually have worse environmental outcomes than those seen in other countries.

It is absolute insanity. If you hit traffic taking your kid to preschool, we should be able to fix it before your kid graduates from college. These delays aren’t just incredibly frustrating for folks who want to see these projects get done, but also cost us billions, meaning the limited highway dollars we have don’t go nearly as far — and the can gets kicked down the road on countless other important projects.

So how do we fix this?

We have to get back to the basics. If you use our roads, you should pay your fair share to fix and maintain them. Most of us have already been doing that for decades, there’s no reason electric vehicle (EV) users, including major corporations like Amazon, which already has some 25,000 EVs on the roads and is expecting to hit 100,000 in the next five years, shouldn’t have to pay their fair share too. They are making a bunch of money delivering packages to our home each day, but getting a free ride while doing it. We’ve also got to make sure our tax dollars are going as far as possible. To that end, we’ve got to cut through the red tape and give states more flexibility to fix the most critical road and bridge challenges they’re facing.

If we want to break the cycle of doing nothing and overreacting, we have to pass a highway bill that anticipates and contemplates fixing the problems of the next 20 years, not overreacting to the last 10 years.

Sincerely,

Sam Graves