Buying our own highway

This budget year in Maine was going to be different. Right? The state would make tough choices on programs — no more smoke and mirrors, no accounting legerdemain or post-dated checks.

How about this: To get a one-time infusion of $16 million for the state budget, the McKernan administration has recommended, and the Transportation Committee agreed in its report released Wednesday to sell a 4.78-mile stretch of the interstate to the Maine Turnpike Authority (MTA).

To come up with the money, the MTA will borrow $21 million over 10 years ($5 million in interest). To repay it, turnpike tolls will go up, a “temporary” surcharge the state assures turnpike users, until the obligation is met.

A bit of history: The Turnpike Authority owned that stretch of highway until 1969, when it gave it to the Transportation Department in exchange for a DOT commitment to tear down the Kittery toll plaza off Route 1, which was by-passed by the new Piscataqua River bridge.

Back in January, this newspaper observed that the deal could make sense for the state if it were part of a larger package to merge the Department of Transportation and the Turnpike Authority, two agencies that serve redundant functions: administering highways in Maine. By folding the responsibility for the MTA’s 100 miles of turnpike into the DOT’s thousands of miles of primary and secondary roads, Maine could save $3 million to $5 million a year.

There is no evidence that this is happening, however, or that state government has any intention of pursuing it. The DOT-MTA merger opportunity is just one barometer of the seriousness to streamline, restructure and consolidate state government. Although there are proposals to tinker with the relationship between these agencies, there is nothing to indicate that the governor or the Legislature is prepared to do what is necessary and unpleasant: combine the two departments and eliminate redundant jobs, trucks and expenses.

The highway purchase deal would shift $150,000 of annual maintenance costs now absorbed by the DOT to the Turnpike Authority, but that’s not reason enough to convey the highway.

The bottom line: Maine residents and highway users are about to go into debt for $21 million to buy back a piece of road that one of their agencies gave to another 24 years ago, but now will buy back in order to plug a $16 million hole in the budget. That’s not responsible government. That’s a shell game.

When this deal came out of the Transportation Committee, 11 members had, in the words of the committee, “reluctantly accepted the governor’s recommendation.” Other ways of accounting for $16 million, they believed, probably would have had a greater negative impact.

Rep. William B. O’Gara, House chairman of the Transportation Committee, had a more accurate and courageous assessment.

One of the two who weren’t reluctant to vote against this proposal, the Westbrook Democrat rejected the sale “as a gimmick that is not responsible fiscal policy.”

There are still a few lawmakers in Augusta who tell it like it is.