On Tuesday, November 16, 2004, at 11:06 PM, Wendy Wulff wrote:
The highway user tax distribution fund (which funds MnDOT, as well as County
State-Aid Highway payments, and Municipal State Aid (MSA) road funding)
comes from 3 sources:
1. The gas tax
2. Motor Vehicle Excise Tax (the sales tax you pay when you buy a car) - a
portion of this goes to roads (just over 30%), a portion to transit
operating costs (just over 20%), and the remainder (a little less than half)
goes to the general fund. So, auto-generated revenue goes toward both the
general fund and transit.
But when you buy a TV a portion of the sales tax on it does not go to public television... so the highway lobby unlike other interests has managed to syphon off a good chuck of the sales taxes we pay on just about everything except food and clothing. When you buy a computer, none of the sales tax on is dedicated to providing computers for the underpriveledged, but the highway lobby has managed to steal a goodly chunk of our sales taxes to fund more highway construction contracts for themselves.
So, if you live in Minneapolis and don't drive a car (yes, there is a Minneapolis connection here) - you can rest assured that you are not contributing one red cent to highways (even if your bus drives on them)
Bull.
Minneapolis has about as many miles of streets as Minnesota has miles of interstate highways. But while those freeways were built almost entirely with federal funds, our city streets were largely paid for by we Minneapolis residents whether we drive on them or not. And thanks to that unfunded manadate known as the Surface Traffic Assistance Act of 1982 as amended we are required to allow the same 40 ton trucks that travel the Interstates access to our network of city streets. We thusly have to with largely our own citizens tax dollars build our streets to the same standards as an interstate highway. We also are forced to live with the 53 foot long trailers that never should have been allowed on even the Interstates snarling our traffic while blocking 3 lanes to make a simple right turn.
One would assume that you would like the ambulance and fire truck to be able
to get to where you live, so hopefully you feel some obligation to chip in
on local streets.
That ambulance weighs at most about 7 tons and the Fire Truck 15- 20, less than half the weight of the commercial trucks we have to build our streets for. Wendy, your argument isn't roadworthy- we could have cheaper and narrower streets or more lanes if we only had to design them to accomodate at most light trucks rather than 70 foot and longer 40 ton plus overload tractor trailer rigs.
hanging on in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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