“While the public has filet mignon expectations, MoDOT has Filet-O-Fish funding,” Missouri Department of Transportation Director Pete Rahn told the Missouri Legislature last winter. Come 2010 or so, MoDOT’s budget will be reduced to macaroni and cheese.
Sooner or later, we must find better ways to pay for our transportation needs, and it might even include some form of the T word: taxes.
The problem has several dimensions:

First, instead of paying for big projects out of its operating budget, MoDOT has been borrowing big money by issuing bonds to finance highway expansion programs. Those projects will be completed in the next couple of years, but the payments on the bonds will continue.
Starting around 2010, the bond payments will be consuming so much of the budget that MoDOT will have to stop building new roads and stop improving existing ones. The agency will have to make do with about a third of its current road spending.
MoDOT has a bonding plan to pay for its relatively small share of the cost of a new Mississippi River bridge, but the expansion of Highway 141 in West County won’t be finished. The Page Avenue extension won’t get past Jungermann Road in St. Charles County, and Interstate 55 in Jefferson County won’t get new lanes.
If the St. Louis region follows its pattern of the last half-century and continues sprawling farther out from the core, suburbanites will spend more and more time stewing in traffic jams.
MoDOT says it will be able to preserve and maintain existing roads and bridges in the region, costs that have been estimated at about $150 million per year for the next 30 years. But money to do any more is drying up.

Normally, we’d expect growth in the economy to rescue the situation. But transportation taxes are a special case.
MoDOT gets its money mainly from gasoline taxes, along with sales taxes on vehicles and registration fees. The state’s portion of gas taxes is a flat 17 cents per gallon, no matter how high the price of gas goes. If higher prices — last week, the average was $3.66 — convince people to use fewer gallons, that will mean less tax revenue. Sales tax revenue on vehicles could drop too, as people buy more little Minis and fewer big SUVs.
On top of that, the St. Louis region will be getting a smaller percentage of state highway funds in coming years. According to recent data collected by the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, the agency responsible for regional planning and the allocation of federal highway money, St. Louis has 34 percent of Missouri’s population, generates 42 percent of the state’s personal income and has 36 percent of Missouri’s employment.
Yet, according to the complicated distribution formula used by MoDOT, the St. Louis region will get just 29.2 percent of state construction funds next year — and that’s projected to drop to 25.4 percent by 2012.
Meanwhile, the federal Highway Trust Fund is headed for financial trouble, too. So we can expect less help from Uncle Sam. That’s a very serious problem, considering that federal funds typically pay 80 percent of the cost of major transportation projects.

A good transportation system is a key to economic development and new jobs. The region needs to come up with some way to pay for it.
There have been some suggestions for an increase in the overall state sales tax that would be dedicated to transportation. But that would hit those who drive a little along with those who drive a lot. Out-of-staters and cross-country trucking companies that put a lot of wear on roads also would escape paying their fair share.
Some legislators and officials at MoDOT have expressed enthusiasm for toll roads, possibly in combination with long-term leases of the facilities to private firms. But several such projects have experienced operational problems in other parts of the country, and some have fallen considerably short of their revenue projections. Those sorts of deals might be right in some circumstances, but they’re not a silver bullet.
The state tax on gasoline and diesel fuel — basically, user fees — seems like the obvious choice, but if gasoline prices remain high, there will be little public support for higher gas taxes. In any case, state funds still account for only 20 percent of the cost of major projects.
Regional political and business leaders need to get creative — before the potholes get too deep.