U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) recently introduced legislation that would direct the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to re-evaluate how federal highway funding is distributed – the first such reevaluation in 16 years.
Both legislators criticized the current policy as not providing enough highway funding to their states.
“For decades, Arizona has received less than its fair share in federal funding for the highways, roads, and bridges we use every day,” Kelly said. “The Highway Formula Modernization Act will ensure that growing states like Arizona are no longer shortchanged and receive the funding needed to make investments in the critical infrastructure Americans rely on.”
The current formulas to allocate highway funding have not been updated since 2005, despite population growth in states like Arizona and Texas. Nearly all federal highway dollars are allocated to states and local governments using the 2005 formula to fund roads, bridges, and other critical transportation infrastructure.
“Texas continually receives proportionally less funding from the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) than any other state, even as we contribute the most in gas tax revenue to the HTF every year,” he said. “Texas taxpayers deserve better, and Texas highways deserve their fair share of infrastructure development funding. I am proud to join Sen. Kelly on this commonsense bill calling for a study to modernize the formula to ensure we invest properly in Texas highways and highways across the nation.”
According to the ENO Center for Transportation, in 2017, Texas not only paid more into the Highway Trust Fund per capita than most states but was also the only state to get less than 100 percent of every dollar that it put into the trust fund.
In 2017, 28.3 million taxpayers in Texas paid $141.04 per capita in excise taxes into the Highway account. Compare that to 39.5 Californians who paid an estimated $86.53 per capita. While every other state in the country in 2018 got more money in funding back than it put in – case in point Alaska, which got 680 cents of highway formula funding for every dollar of tax it paid in 2017 – Texas got 95 percent of the money it paid into the trust fund.