Paying The Piper

Let’s start this month’s column with a quiz: I am thinking of a governor of a state that voted for President Obama last November. In his state’s most recent legislative session this governor proposed increasing his state’s gas tax by a substantial margin. As part of a lobbying campaign to achieve this goal, he went on record as noting that "This is common sense … we need to make this investment."

Most Marylanders would likely guess that I was describing Governor O’Malley. Wrong. The correct answer is Governor Rick Snyder of the great state of Michigan. For those of you who don’t follow domestic politics, Snyder is a card-carrying conservative, and like most on the right, he hates taxes and unions (so much so that he was successful in making Michigan a right-to-work state).

Why would an apostle of Ronald Reagan engage in such apostasy? The answer is simple: Michigan’s roads are crumbling. In addition, while Snyder is taking a risk in raising the price of a gallon of gas by 14 cents, he also knows the money from gas taxes does not generally go to the general fund. Instead it ends up being used to build and maintain a state’s infrastructure, which even conservatives agree is critical to economic development.

With these facts in mind, one should not be surprised that Governor O’Malley is doing the responsible thing by having the courage and integrity to raise the revenue needed to ensure that our state continues to have a viable transportation system. We have not raised the gas tax in this state for almost two decades. In addition, the volume of traffic on our roads has increased exponentially. If we don’t act now we will pay a horrible price in the future.

There are good arguments against this proposal. The economy is still in a holding pattern and family budgets are tight. However, I fail to see how letting our road system crumble around us will help restore higher levels of economic activity.

Others say that Governor O’Malley has been disingenuous. They claim the reason the maintenance fund for our roads is less than solvent is that the chief executive and the legislature have used past tax hikes on tolls and gas for things other than transportation. The fact is that most state governors on both sides of the political spectrum move money around and engage in creative accounting in an effort to meet the balanced budget requirements of their respective state constitutions. In the end, tax dollars, whether they pay for roads or school lunches, go to help maintain civilization in our state and our nation.

O’Malley has been no exception to this trend. Bob Ehrlich tried valiantly to make a campaign issue out of it in the last gubernatorial election. He failed. Apparently the majority of the people of Maryland are enamored of the current governor’s stewardship of the state’s tax dollars. O’Malley is still the governor while Ehrlich has been reduced to writing a weekly column for the Baltimore Sun.

Last month, I urged the new county executive to have the courage to raise taxes to restore our crumbling schools. With a billion-dollar maintenance backlog, it’s time to pay the piper in order to keep our schools viable for future generations. We have a high quality of life in our state, but it does not come without a price. Schools, roads and infrastructure have to be paid for and Governor O’Malley’s gas tax proposals are a tough but necessary part of a worthy effort to ensure that Maryland remains a wonderful place to live.