In 2008, TDOT will spend $113 million, more than everything scheduled for Interstate maintenance, in earmarks on rural highway projects. TDOT plans to spend $56.6 million on state bridges and $38.2 million on local bridges in the state while spending on the nebulous category of Enhancements will be $106.7 million. Enhancement spending will be three times what will be spent on rural congestion mitigation. These enhancement projects are too numerous to mention but a few familiar definitions would be related to highway beautification, mitigating road kill, signs, benches, sidewalks recreational trails and bike trails. Enhancement spending might be viewed as the fruits of good stewardship if the normal and routine expenses of a transportation system were satisfied first. But, now comes the dilemma of the Sligo Bridge east of Smithville.

Replacing this 60 year old structure that serves a daily average traffic of 5000 will cost $25 million dollars. It would cost a lot less if the entire bridge were shut down for a year to 18 months, maybe $5 million. This is a hard problem since the average bridge replacement or rehab has been running between $500,000 and $600,000. Should TDOT shut this bridge down and save $15 million dollars that could be used to fix possibly 30 other bridges? The burden of driving around this unusually long bridge is enormous and will cost the local traveler, tourist and local government a lot of money and time. This difficult calculation can be avoided by an earmark. Unfortunately, the earmarking process takes away from all categories of spending, sometime in the future, instead of taking away from only the least important categories.

An earmark to fix common, routine and what should have been a scheduled replacement of the Sligo Bridge is a warning to travelers and the 19,000 people who live in Dekalb County that all is not well at TDOT. Another warning is under the category of dangerous roads. Only $7.5 million dollars is scheduled for 2008 for high risk rural roads. To qualify for this program, some kind of demonstration that the road is more dangerous than average must be presented. Logically, half the roads in Tennessee should be qualified to get this money yet there is an extravagant qualification and training process required to get the data and the money. Planned High Risk Roads expenditures in 2008 are roughly equivalent to the cost of half of a new Interstate rest stop and there are two new rest stops on the horizon in Tennessee in the next three years. This leads me to believe that not only financial responsibility but safety is taking a back seat at TDOT.

If Senator Alexander gets an earmark for the Sligo Bridge replacement, he will effectively remove any responsibility and accountability from TDOT for making the hard and ethical choices required to run a highway department. Earmarking perpetuates bad transportation spending choices by willfully refusing to weed out the bad or low priority choices. As inflation and gas prices eats away at TDOT’s income, these choices will not get easier and will get more frequent. If money is moved away from some future economic development project, bike trail, scenic easements or greenways project and diverted to the necessity of people going to work through DeKalb County, the normal person who must make such choices every day will both understand and approve. I suspect that this situation will be a major talking point in the future that will prove to some that TDOT simply needs more gas tax money rather than needing a better system of spending what it has.

Danny L. Newton
Cookeville Tennessee