Voters OK $203 Billion for Transportation; Major Turnover Coming in State Capitols
This story appears in the Nov. 21 print edition of Transport Topics.
The upset in the presidential election was understandably the biggest news Nov. 8, but plenty of change also is coming for the leadership of transportation legislative committees in the 50 states.
About two dozen states will have new transportation committee chairmen in at least one state legislative house. Those changes will occur because of retirements, term limits, switches in party control, promotions or election defeats according to Transport Topics interviews with officials in nearly every state.
Voters in 24 states approved 193 state and local ballot initiatives for transportation projects, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association revealed during a Nov. 10 webinar. ARTBA said that 280 such proposals — up from 225 in 2014 — worth a record $249 billion were on the ballot in 31 states. The 69% passage success rate was down by 1 percentage point from 2015 but up 1 point from 2012, the previous presidential election year.
All told, the approved transportation measures are worth $203 billion. Thirty-one percent of the proposals are devoted to multimodal projects worth $136.7 billion.
Two-thirds of the measures passed, totaling $2.6 billion, will go solely to roads and bridges.
Voters in California, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina and Washington state approved proposals each worth at least $1 billion, with California’s coming in at $133 billion. Eight of the 15 measures worth at least $1 billion that were approved were in the Golden State.
Nationally, 23 state proposals were worth between $100 million and $1 billion, and 18 of them passed.
“I think that’s reflecting some of the market dynamics,” said ARTBA Chief Economist Alison Premo Black, who noted that fewer than 100 such measures typically had been on ballots in a given year before 2014.
“There were some very big dollar amounts that were passed that should really help support and transform investments in some key markets,” Black said.
Fifty-one percent of the ballot measures involved property tax increases, and an additional 23% using sales or income taxes. Bonds, 10%, and fuel taxes, 9% — all in Nevada and Oregon — followed. More than four-fifths of the property tax and bond measures passed, along with 61% of the sales-income tax proposals, which were worth $138 billion of the $203 billion approved.
However, just one of the 25 fuel tax-related proposals — in Clark County, Nevada — received a thumbs-up from voters.
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming are among the states with leadership changes.
Both of Iowa’s chambers will have new transportation chairmen because of a change of party control in the Senate and a retirement in the House. Republicans also took control of Kentucky’s House. Michigan Rep. Ben Glardon, vice chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, was term-limited, and Minnesota’s Tim Kelly retired. Sen. Chris Walters, chairman of the West Virginia Senate Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, lost re-election on Nov. 8.
In Alabama, Mac McCutcheon has been elevated to speaker of the House of Representatives from transportation committee chairman.
House Transportation Chairwomen Charlene Fernandez of Arizona and Prissy Hickerson of Arkansas are retiring. So are state Senate transportation chairwomen Karen Peterson of Delaware and Nancy Stiles of New Hampshire.
