Representative Bob Kulp's Listening Session in Marshfield, Transportation Budget
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2015 -- 1:10 PM
-Representative Bob Kulp was in our area on Monday of last week, holding listening sessions for residents to voice their concerns.One issue brought up was the funds shortfall the Transportation Department is facing. Representative Kulp talked with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation Investment Management people, who actually handle the department's budget and provided his thoughts on how to get some money back into the fund.
He said, "We were talking about things on the cost side of road construction like do we have the right formulation of concrete? There are so many things on the material cost side; there's the personnel cost side; there's the labor cost side, the personnel within the DOT and then the labor component outside the DOT."
"The state seems focused on the generating revenue side. Some of the ideas that are being floated with regards to transportation, just to take it off on the that, is to have a $.1 per mile self reporting thing that you do on your registration form at the end of the year."
"Either way, we have a cost issue on transportation. We also have, I believe, a revenue challenge on transportation. I'll go out on a limb and say, personally, I believe that the best way with the least amount of administrative overhead would be to have an accelerator in the gas tax. Lets say $.2 for 6 months, $.4 for another 6 months and take that up slowly so there's not some great big cliff effect."
"We've left, because of gas tax indexing, we've left $1.4 billion that we haven't collected in the last 7 years because of not indexing. $1.4 billion only fills the hole for 2 years, but it does fill the hole for 2 years."
Representative Kulp was in Granton, Marshfield and Abbotsford.
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