LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department is pushing back hard against newspaper coverage and a published fuel tax map from May 10 that AHTD officials felt misrepresented the state's road project revenue relative to neighboring states, according to an article in the journal of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation officials (AASHTO).
And in the process the AHTD is highlighting the importance of transportation agency officials making sure the public and government decision-makers have correct information in the proper context, in an era when social media may quickly repeat select tidbits without that context.
That role is especially important when policymakers are considering how much to invest in transportation infrastructure and how to pay for it, AHTD Director Scott Bennett told the AASHTO Journal.
“Sometimes this means that we need to address things in the media — including social media — head-on to dispel inaccuracies and misleading information,” he said. “We can't simply write it off because we have said otherwise or because they just don't understand.”
The May 10 report from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper's Northwest Arkansas Edition came at a key moment when the General Assembly was on a legislative deadline and wrestling with how to increase AHTD funding. Some legislators proposed raising the state's motor fuel taxes to generate revenue on a long-term basis.
That newspaper-generated map showed Arkansas' per-gallon gasoline and diesel excise taxes higher than all of the state's neighbors by at least 1.5 cents a gallon.
Even before the newspaper repeated the information on May 19 in another edition, it was already spreading quickly on Twitter and other social-media sites among critics who opposed having Arkansas push its fuel tax rates farther beyond those of surrounding states.
What that media map did not show was how much those states also tap other revenue sources than fuel taxes for their transportation programs, the Journal article reported.
When those sources are factored in and translated into a fuel-tax equivalent, the AHTD says, Arkansas significantly trails most of those neighbors.
Soon after, lawmakers instead approved a funding transfer measure that would redirect money from other budget accounts to the AHTD, reportedly adding about $50 million a year for its project needs. But it was a limited-term measure intended to cover the department's federal funding match requirements for five years and was a scaled-down version of what Gov. Asa Hutchinson first proposed in January.
The Arkansas State Highway Commission, the AHTD's oversight body, said the new funding measure addressed “our most critical, immediate need for highway investment,” but expressed concern about whether some of the targeted transfer funds would be available beyond the first year. And the commission said it still wanted to work with the governor and legislative leaders to find “a long-term sustainable source of revenue for investing in safety, mobility and economic development.”
However, that Arkansas Democrat-Gazette map was still out there on the record and in the public mind, helping undermine the case for long-term investment action. Even after the new state measure, Arkansas officials reportedly said they could expect $3.6 billion in state and federal funding over the next decade, against more than $20 billion in highway needs for that period.
Bennett unveiled his own map in a June 1 commission meeting that calculates the surrounding states’ total transportation revenue streams.
On June 7, the AHTD issued a press release titled “Arkansas Fuel Tax Rates and Highway Funding — The Rest of The Story,” which explained the comparisons and included the department's revenue-adjusted map.
It was picked up and repeated in publications across the state, and the AHTD promoted it through social media. "There are many factors that go into highway funding in each state," the AHTD said. "The fact that Arkansas' fuel consumption levels are the lowest of all the states shown further diminishes our revenue. To accurately make comparisons, all of those factors must be considered, not just one part of the equation."
Bennett told the AASHTO Journal: “For state departments of transportation, education — telling our story — is one of the most important, and often one of the most difficult, aspects of our jobs.”
He said highway funding and the gap between needs and revenue is difficult for “our target audiences” of the traveling public and elected officials to understand, and “it is commonplace for these groups to compare issues in their own state to what they perceive is going on in surrounding states or around the country.”
But the challenge of providing the information, Bennett said, “is sometimes exacerbated by the media, and often social media, who tend to key on one thing that only tells part of the story —which makes it inaccurate and misleading.
“Our transportation infrastructure needs across the country will never be completely met. But we can only improve from where we are today if we gain support from the traveling public and our elected officials by completely, accurately and concisely telling the whole story in as widespread a manner as possible.”
The Trucker News Services
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