Fixing the roads is a core government responsibility, DEI is not.

by Rob Roper

The Vermont Transportation Fund – the pool of money used to maintain our roads and bridges – is facing a shortfall somewhere in the thirty millions of dollars (I’ve heard numbers between $31 and $37 million). If we don’t find a way to fill that hole, the state will miss out on federal matching funds amounting to around $165 million. We can’t not come up with that $35ish million.

Now, I am normally all for shrinking government, spending less, and leaving it to free markets to meet demand. But transportation infrastructure is one of those core government functions that the free market can’t really do well for itself. Not that the government is all that great shakes these days either. The condition of too much our pavement is atrocious and needs to be fixed. And, as I write these words while hunkered down amidst an arctic deep-freeze and impending Snowmageddon, I hear the state is also out of salt to de-ice the roads. Just peachy!

To help cover some of the money we need to spend to get those federal matching funds, it looks like nineteen people in the Department of Transportation will lose their jobs. I don’t know what these people do, but if it has anything to do with paving potholes, plowing snow, spreading salt, or maintaining bridges, I hope somebody re-thinks this decision. I have ideas.

But first, we would not be in this pickle if roughly $50 million in Vehicle Purchase & Use taxes we pay (one third of the total take), which should go to Transportation, weren’t being robbed by the Education Fund so our public schools can spend over 40% more than they were spending five years ago to turn out kids with lower test scores than those in Mississippi. Yes, I am bitter about this and will continue to point it out until those responsible for obliterating the minds of a generation and robbing property owners blind are held financially accountable. The root cause of many of our affordability issues, including our crumbling roads and bridges, is the greedy, incompetent, but politically powerful public-school bureaucracy.

Governor Scott has proposed shifting $10 million of the Vehicle Purchase & Use Tax back to the Transportation Fund this year as a first step toward returning it entirely. But, as some have rightly pointed out, removing the money from the Education Fund would put upward pressure on property taxes. So, cut $10 million in education spending! The temporary federally-funded Covid emergency program of Universal School Meals, which in practice just subsidizes the food of students from high income families, now made permanent with state property tax funds, costs Vermont roughly $30 million a year. Scrap it and use the savings to restore the Purchase & Use Tax to the Transportation fund.

As for those nineteen Transportation Agency employees about to lose their jobs, why don’t we look elsewhere for RIF savings in other departments?

First up, the Office of Racial Equity. It has a staff of six and a budget costing us about $1.8 million that, per all evidence, doesn’t do anything. Go to their website under “Our Work” and except for an annual report consisting of a dozen pages Chat GPT could churn out in a nanosecond, there’s precious little “work” to be seen. I Googled the director of the office, Xusana Davis, in the news and the last time she pops up is in a 2024 story where she is noted as having abstained in a vote to postpone a vote. Important stuff! Yeah, scrap this useless, DEI inspired, window dressing department and use the $1.8 million to buy road salt. Or hula-girl dashboard ornaments for all the plow trucks, which would still be a better use of the money.

Another thoroughly useless department: The Climate Action Office. This one has eight personnel at a price of over $1 million. Not a lot in a $9.4 billion budget, but every little bit helps, and I’d rather have six people working to fix our roads than six people figuring out how to tax our gasoline and diesel and ban the cars we want to buy from using the roads at all. The Climate Action Office was put in place to help implement the Global Warming Solutions Act, and so long as the Democrats don’t have the stones to pass any policy that would actually meet the targets they put into law, we don’t need (never really needed, and hopefully never need) a Climate Action Office. Dump it!

And with it, toss out the equally useless Climate Council. Their job is to come up with a Climate Action Plan (which they have never really done in five years; a list of recommendations without timelines, budget estimates, identified funding sources, logistics, etcetera is not a plan). They updated this so-called plan in December, and we are now nearly a month into the legislative session an NOBODY in either the house or senate committees of jurisdiction has asked for ANYBODY from the Climate Council to come testify as to what the recommendations to the legislature in their updated “plan” are. So, if nobody cares about the work the Climate Council is doing, why are we paying them to do it. Repurpose the revenue to something useful.

I’m sure there are plenty of other similarly vestigial organs in our body of state government we could save money by surgically removing them. What, dear reader, are your ideas and insights? Share in the comments. Let’s put together a list. A long one.

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 25 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.