A knee-jerk vote
The Marathon County Board of Supervisors last week Tuesday agreed to pledge $195,000 from its contingency fund as matching money to win a federal Community Air Service Development Program grant and bring a low cost carrier, such as Sun Country Airlines, to Central Wisconsin Airport (CWA). The vote was unanimous.
In itself, the spending is not that big of a deal. The measure, however, only further muddies county policy, in general, about funding transportation projects. We wish the board had spent more time discussing the agenda item.
In its vote, the county board agreed to use contingency funds and $105,000 from Portage County to pledge $300,000 in a competition to get a $900,000 federal grant. The grant would be used as a cash incentive to bring a low cost airline to CWA and, hopefully, retain flying customers lost to other regional airports after United Airlines pulled out in early January. CWA only recently completed a $38 million renovation project.
Low cost carriers, CWA director Brian Grefe told the board, are the only growing sector of today’s airlines industry. They specialize in no-frills, destination-to destination travel that bypasses hub and spoke airports, such as in Minneapolis and Chicago. Grefe said a low cost carrier at CWA would likely offer flights to standard winter destinations such as Florida, Phoenix and Las Vegas.
Supervisor Becky Buch, Wausau, a conservative, said this all sounded great. Her family likes to travel, she reported, and said bringing a low-cost carrier to CWA would be “fabulous.”
The problem with the CWA decision is the precedent it sets as the county contemplates a North Central Regional Planning (NCRP) long-range highway plan. The document identifi es a multi-million dollar annual deficit in funding blacktop maintenance across the county’s 611-mile inventory of roads.
The CWA decision says that property taxpayers should pay for transportation, not the users.
This is a controversial position. To deal with a backlog of highway maintenance, the county years ago approved a $25 vehicle registration fee (“wheel tax”) that has, to this point, allowed county crews to hit their goal of maintaining county highways at a seven out of 10 on the PASER rating. The county board approved this fee under the belief that highway users, not property taxpayers, should shoulder the burden of fixing wear and tear on the roads.
The CWA decision contradicts this philosophy, but is even more problematic. That’s because a county investment in a low-cost carrier doesn’t subsidize local economic development, but, instead, subsidizes the county’s better off, vacationing public spending its disposable income in sunny Florida and sinful Las Vegas. The subsidy will likely help boost CWA enplanement numbers, but by making sure people don’t spend their recreation dollars here.
This further complicates what to do with highways. Faced with the possibility that people won’t want to pay more for highway maintenance, NCRP suggests that the county could whittle down its road inventory, keeping its high volume roads with the biggest economic development thump while jettisoning its low volume, rural highways to town and village governments. This is a head-on collision with the CWA decision. NRCP theorizes that economics, measured in jobs, should guide highway priorities. The CWA decision, however, says economics don’t matter.
The county board will, soon enough, have to deal with a multi-million dollar decision over road maintenance. Having a thoughtful, consistent and overarching approach to transportation might make that decision easier. Last Tuesday’s knee-jerk vote didn’t help things at all.
