I see Deval Patrick on TV, see those intelligent eyes burn with anger when he talks about the mess his predecessors left him.
And maybe he's right. The dilapidated state of the commonwealth's infrastructure may be the result of prior administrations' "avoiding the truth and the consequences" of a transportation system rife with mismanagement, waste and misplaced priorities—just as the governor said in his speech last week announcing his new Transportation and Economic Security Plan. To put a finer point on it, Patrick reached for a powerful symbol: the Big Dig. The governor blames the state's crumbling transportation system—deteriorating roads and bridges, aging commuter rail systems—on the "Big Dig culture."
If the governor is half as mad at the Big Dig culture as folks here in Western Massachusetts are, he must be pretty darn mad. Out here in the 413 area code, we watched as billions in federal transportation funding poured, with little oversight or regard for fiscal responsibility, into the greater Boston economy, triggering and sustaining (for a long while) a boom inside Route 495, enriching everyone from high-priced lawyers like Patrick to the lowliest hot dog vendor working pushcarts outside the Fleet Center. If you compare the sustained double-digit rise in home values in greater Boston to the relatively flat home prices in places like Springfield and Holyoke during the Big Dig years, it's fair to say that the Valley felt little benefit from that bloated and corrupt project.
But let's not make this a regional thing. Surely we don't want to line up with the naysayers who carp at Patrick's plan to hike the gas tax by 19 cents a gallon. "Don't just criticize from the sidelines and watch the situation get worse, as those before us have," Patrick admonishes the body politic. Let's not whine about how unfair his plan is to the western-most region of the state—a place where driving long distances to work is necessitated in part by the lack of state investment in public transportation.
The governor and his experts peg the cost of revivifying our neglected transportation infrastructure at $19 billion over the next 20 years. He proposes a 19-cent-per-gallon hike in the gas tax—"The average driver would pay the equivalent of about one large cup of coffee a week, less than $8 per month," Patrick said last week—knowing that it won't be popular. "It is a crummy time to ask people to contribute more," the governor said. "That is just one of the reasons I have come so reluctantly to support increasing the gas tax."
It's swell that the governor isn't more enthusiastic in proposing what is, in the truest sense, a regressive tax "to address the full cost of neglect and inaction over the last 16 or more years." Perhaps it was that reluctance that forced him to back away from his initially proposed 27-cent-per-gallon hike.
Still, gas taxes are regressive, taking exactly the same amount per gallon from the poorest citizens as they do from the wealthiest. A minimum wage earner who needs to drive to work bears a disproportionate burden, spending a significantly greater percentage of her annual income to pay the tax than someone who makes more money and consumes the same amount of gasoline.
Perhaps more troubling than the tax hike itself is Patrick's apparent effort to hold anyone who gases up a vehicle in the state responsible for "the Big Dig culture." True, Patrick has responded to calls from the state GOP to reform the state's bloated, inefficient transportation bureaucracy. "Reforms are vital and therefore central to our plan," he said last week, picking up on the "reform before revenue" mantra coming from his critics. "But we cannot secure our economic future and the public's safety on the roads, rails and bridges with reforms alone."
Patrick may be right that reform, alone, won't solve the problem. But his critics have every right to be extremely dubious of the governor's commitment to reform, let alone his distance from the Big Dig culture he claims to revile. His appointment of James Aloisi to the Massachusetts Port Authority—Aloisi had been on Patrick's short list for Transportation Secretary—has infuriated many who view the politically connected lawyer as a central figure in the Big Dig debacle. Aloisi's client list includes the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
When Patrick comes up with a plan to revive the transportation system that doesn't unfairly burden lower wage earners and reward political hacks who helped drag that system down, we should all support his efforts to fix the mistakes of his predecessors. Until then, we're better off living with old mistakes than allowing Patrick to make new ones.
