Since today is my last day working at the Wisconsin DNR, I hope you don't mind my republishing the story that changed everything for me at there (below).
The $20 billion DOT and road building industry plan proposed in 1999 to expand the capacity of the state's highway system to accept even more and faster motor vehicle driving was approved by the Wisconsin Legislature and is still on track. Now the governor wants to raise motor vehicle license fees by yet another $20 per vehicle to help fund the plan -- with no additional money for non motorized travel or mass transit I might add. The $20 increase in vehicle license fees will hurt those who can least afford it the most, yet it will do nothing to discourage additional motor vehicle driving by those who already overuse the highway system and overtax our environment. Also see: http://www.danenet.org/bcp2006/shp.html Mike Neuman "We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity." - Martin Luther King, Jr. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------- AUTHOR DEFENDS OFFERING REBATE FOR NOT DRIVING OTHERS `FLOOR IT' TO GET AWAY FROM PROPOSAL By David Callender The Capital Times Mike Neuman says he wasn't surprised by the uproar he provoked when he suggested to a group of local officials last month that the state pay car owners up to $2,800 a year not to drive. But the Department of Natural Resources analyst says he was dismayed when Secretary George Meyer publicly dumped the proposal in less than a day, even before it received a fair hearing.``It made me sick,'' he said in an interview. ``I felt personally embarrassed and embarrassed for the department. I'm a 25-year employee, and this is the kind of work I do.'' Although the DNR secretary has now disowned it, and the state Department of Transportation said it would not even consider studying it, Neuman's proposal remains at the center of a debate over the direction of the state's long-term transportation plan. Environmental groups and some local government officials have hailed it for recognizing that building new roads and widening old ones carries costs beyond just construction and concrete, without necessarily easing traffic congestion. Meanwhile critics -- road builders and their supporters in the Legislature as well as Meyer -- have rejected Neuman's proposal as unreasonable and unrealistic. The debate over the proposal hasn't fazed Neuman, a soft-spoken self-described environmentalist who regularly bikes to work from his home on Madison's west side. He says he intended to provoke people into talking about the state's future. But he says he has been stung by how readily his own agency dropped the proposal at the first sign of opposition -- and, more importantly, how willing it was to shut down discussion about the long-term consequences of what he views as Wisconsin's current road-building mania. Driving need: Neuman says he hit on the idea of rewarding citizens for not driving several years ago. He says his inspiration came during a 25th anniversary celebration of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the UW-Madison, where he received master's degrees in water resources management and agricultural economics. The premise of his proposal is simple. ``Basically, the less you drive, the greater the (financial) incentive,' he says. Participation in the rebate program would be voluntary, and payments would range from $400 to $2,800 depending on the number of miles driven. The money would be a rebate from the Transportation Fund, which is supported byte state gas tax. The rebate would cost $826 million a year and would last for 10 years, for a total cost of roughly $8.3 billion. The Department of Transportation would register participants, who would pay a small fee, about $30 annually, to get the rebate. Those who don't own cars would also be eligible for the rebates, but households whose members drive more than 15,000 miles a year would not. Neuman says the DOT's 20-year highway plan demonstrates the urgent need for more alternatives to driving. In the past three decades, the number of vehicle miles traveled by Wisconsin drivers has more than doubled, from 25 billion in 1970 to 56 billion in 1998. The DOT plan predicts state drivers will travel at least 62 billion miles by 2020. The DOT's road-building plan calls for adding 2,800 new miles of highway lanes and 25,000 additional acres of highway infrastructure at a cost of $20 billion. The environmental costs will be greater, Neuman says. Wildlife habitats, wetlands and agricultural land will all be lost, while tons of pollutants will be released into the air. What's more, the road-building will trigger new development in the countryside that will consume ``at least 10 times'' as much additional land as that used by the roads. Residents will move further into the countryside because new roads will take them to their jobs and other destinations faster. Neuman contends those costs far outstrip the $826 million annual price of his rebate proposal. And he argues that if the rebates remain in place for 10 years, drivers will have changed their habits enough that the additional roads won't be needed.< Hostile reception: Neuman says the DOT's and lawmakers' response to his proposal -- and even the speed with which top DNR officials distanced themselves from it -- wasn't a complete surprise. ``Most people, when they hear this, they just casually dismiss it because it appears a little too radical and unrealistic,'' he says. But he says it often takes a long time for people to change their thinking, so it could be years before people recognize how the proposal could improve their lives. For example, if the plan were to take effect, in 30 years Dane County would look pretty much as it does now, with farms, wetlands, and open spaces remaining. Neuman adds that even those who don't participate in the rebate program may benefit from it. ``They'll have less congestion on the roads they drive. They'll have lower gas taxes because less highways will be needed. They'll have cleaner air to breathe, and there won't be so many people moving out of the cities to where it's no longer the countryside,'' he says. http://www.madison.com/tct/archives/index.php?archAction=arch_read&a_from =search&a_file=%2Ftct%2F1999%2F12%2F20%2F9912200246.php&var_search=Search &keyword_field=dnr%20secretary%20highway%20plan&pub_code_field=tct&from_d ate_field=19991220&to_date_field=&var_start_pos=0&var_articles_per_page=1 0 BOSS HAD SIGNED ON TO `UNREALISTIC' IDEA By By David Callender The Capital Times Department of Natural Resources analyst Mike Neuman says officials in his agency haven't told the whole story about their support for his controversial rebate proposal. The day after news stories about Neuman's comments to a coalition of local government officials appeared, DNR Secretary George Meyer called the rebate``a trial balloon to help spark public consideration of a wide variety of ideas'' to help reduce the need for more new roads.``The DNR is realistic,'' he said. But according to DNR records, Meyer himself launched the rebate ``trial balloon'' along with two other alternatives in a letter last May to DOT Secretary Charles Thompson. The other options called for giving employers cash incentives to encourage their employees to quit driving to work by increasing parking fees and for creating ``restricted auto use zones'' in some cities, such as the State Street Mall in Madison. But Meyer's May letter gave the most attention to the rebate proposal --which was essentially the same ``plan'' that got Neuman into trouble when he presented it to the Fair Share Coalition on Nov. 29. Meyer said this week that he objected to Neuman making the rebate proposal public because it ``was not fully developed and did not receive the endorsement of the administration of this agency. ``I personally would not take out such a plan without taking it to the Natural Resources Board. This was not a minor proposal. This was an $800 million, taxpayer-supported proposal.'' Meyer also said there were ``significant differences'' between the May and November versions of the rebate proposal, but he could not identify what they were. Both Neuman and Meyer acknowledge that the rebate proposal reflects an ongoing fear within the DNR that continuing road construction and ever-increasing traffic flows threaten Wisconsin's environment. And they both say the DNR is becoming increasingly frustrated by the DOT's unwillingness to consider more alternatives to driving. In his May letter to Thompson, Meyer said the DOT's 20-year transportation plan ``accepts vehicular travel as a given and accommodates it through increasing highway capacity.'' ``The result, I fear, will be a transportation system that in two decades substantially increases congestion on our secondary and local road systems, continues to facilitate poor land use, and harms Wisconsin's environment, economy, and quality of life in numerous, irreparable ways,'' he wrote. The DNR, which reviews DOT plans as part of the environmental impact study process, has consistently recommended that the state's extensive highway-building plans should include some mechanism to cut down on driving, which would reduce the need for new roads in the future. The DNR began to voice those concerns five years ago in response to the Dot's ``TransLinks 21'' long-term transportation plan. Neuman, as a DNR transportation and environmental liaison, authored several DNR reviews that recommended the DOT develop more alternatives to new road construction. The DOT repeatedly ignored those recommendations, ``and they got away with it one too many times,'' he says. That's why the DNR's review of the new highway plan recommended that the DOT study the rebate proposal and two other alternatives to driving. And to underscore the DNR's commitment to getting the DOT to consider the alternatives, Neuman and Meyer filed a formal statement, dated Nov. 8,reminding the DOT that they had proposed three alternatives in their earlier report. ``We see no indication that this has been done,'' the two DNR officials wrote. Meyer and Neuman then warned that if the DOT did not address the DNR's environmental objections to the highway plan, ``they should be elevated to Cabinet-level discussions.'' http://www.madison.com/tct/archives/index.php?archAction=arch_read&a_from =search&a_file=%2Ftct%2F1999%2F12%2F20%2F9912200252.php&var_search=Search &keyword_field=dnr%20secretary%20highway%20plan&pub_code_field=tct&from_d ate_field=19991220&to_date_field=&var_start_pos=0&var_articles_per_page=1 0 _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
