Amendment To Protect Transportation Fund Will Be On November Ballot

Voters will be asked this November whether they want to amend Wisconsin’s constitution to protect the state’s transportation fund.

The road-building lobby began pushing for this amendment after Gov. Jim Doyle and lawmakers from both parties used more than a billion dollars in the transportation fund to fill budget deficits elsewhere in the early to mid-2000s. The Wisconsin Transportation Development Association’s Craig Thompson said that until then, fees like the gas tax were always understood to be separate from the rest of the state budget.

“There’s always been a compact that those funds are separate — that our gas taxes and our registration fees are user fees and are supposed to go into a separate fund to be spent on transportation. It’s only in recent years that that trust has been broken,” said Thompson.

If voters vote “yes” for this amendment, money that goes into the transportation fund could no longer be transferred out of the fund to pay other state bills.

While no groups have campaigned against this change, Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, has been a vocal opponent, saying the amendment sends the wrong message.

“It means Wisconsin has prioritized building roads over other funding needs, such as the funding for education, for health care, conservation, police and fire services and other programs,” said Risser. “The Legislature, in my opinion, should have the flexibility to decide how the state directs the money it takes in.”

Risser said the amendment won’t prevent governors and legislatures from using money from other funds to pay for transportation — a practice Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers have used in recent years in order to balance out the roads budget.