I just caught something unbelievable at the Joint committee on Finance meeting on transportation:
Today at 2:31pm, Senator Luther Olsen (R) asked the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) what the net balance was in terms of funds put into General Purpose Revenue (GPR) from the Transportation Fund. The sum as of today is $100mil, but the Governor's current budget would put the net balance at $300mil from GPR _INTO_ the transportation fund. That is right, at this point in time GPR is set to be raided to subsidize state transportation. And yet no commensurate increase in dollars for bicycling (& transit) is provided in the budget. You can watch for yourself tomorrow when the video is made available on the Wisconsin Eye website. -----Original Message----- From: Matt Logan [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 8:07 PM To: 'Bikies' Subject: RE: [Bikies] So what is the Gov going to do to state bicycle funding? >> If the fund is raided (as Jim Doyle did to the tune of $1.3 billion >> to pay for other programs that better appealed to his supporter base) >> available dollars for bicycling (& transit) are reduced accordingly. The thing is, while money was taken from the fund, spending didn't go down during the "raids": the money was simply borrowed through bonding to fill the gap, hence bicycling (& transit) don't have to be reduced accordingly. And guess where the money is going to come from to pay off those state bonds? General Purpose revenue! The real consequence of the "raid" boils down to the extra interest that the state incurs as a result of the borrowing. And our Governor has just proposed more borrowing - Walker and Doyle have basically done the same thing! The "raids" canard and AJR2 are tools being used to promote Walker's vision of a "user pays" system of highways, that he suggests will convince voters to support Tolling and Gas Tax increases in the future. In order to make that happen, I suspect he will cut everything but highways and local road aids to pave the way. But I doubt that when the time comes, voters will be willing to absorb those extra fees, seeing as they will have no alternative but to drive on all the new highway miles - and they will feel entitled to the services being subsidized by GPR. Given the current political makeup and the gerrymandering of our state congressional districts, it is unlikely AJR2's protections will benefit bicyclists in Wisconsin for at least the next 7 years. So as I think is obvious now, AJR2 has nothing to do with bicycling, yet the Bike Fed is on record with the GAB as supporting it. It makes me wonder if the Bike Fed understands the situation they are dealing with. _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org
