Fix Our Infrastructure - Election Year or Not

This may be an election year, but that is not an excuse for state legislators to shy away from fixing California’s ailing infrastructure.

With Governor Brown beginning the new year with a budget proposal and State of the State address largely focused on avoiding the “zig-zag of spend-cut-spend”, the legislature will be tested in their ability to divvy up the available resources including $1 billion in cap and trade funds to important projects and programs.

To start the year, lawmakers inherit the mess left behind from a 2015 special session that failed to address the $77 billion shortfall in repairs to highways, bridges and roads.

And if you thought that the answer would lie in the Governor’s proposed budget, you were wrong.

The only significant transportation funding outlined in the budget proposal matches the $3.6 billion per year put forward at the end of last year -- a number that was balked at by transportation advocates while failing to persuade those lawmakers unwilling to spend any more on infrastructure without Caltrans reform on the table.

Assemblymember Jim Frazier has proposed a transportation funding package that would provide $7 billion per year -- almost twice the Governor’s proposal.

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Assemblymember Frazier joins the Council for an evening reception on February 11. 

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Given the usual rancor of an election year, there is little to suggest that there will be an increased appetite for such a substantial spending package even if it is sorely needed.

However, if Asm. Frazier’s legislative colleagues do not support the funding needed to fix our failing infrastructure, Frazier half-joked at a meeting hosted at the Alameda County Transportation Commission on Friday that he may “start naming gravel roads after them in their districts.”

We applaud Assemblymember Frazier’s leadership and will continue to work to get meaningful investment in infrastructure by the state over the finish line this session. The perpetual abdication of leadership is not acceptable on this issue.

As much as the Council appreciates Governor Brown’s wariness towards new spending, the longer we wait to fix our crumbling roads the more it will cost East Bay employers and residents.

Now is the time to fix our roads and invest in infrastructure.

Election year or not.