Nebraska among states balking at road-work earmarks

rrod Haberman of Gering, Neb. has a “Field of Dreams” feeling about the Heartland Expressway in western Nebraska. If they build it, people and prosperity will come, he says. So Haberman, director of the Panhandle Area Development District, cheered when Nebraska lawmakers won a $21.5 million earmark for the expressway in a big 2005 federal highway bill. Nebraska Department of Roads officials aren’t so sure. “A road, in and of itself, is not going to build the economy for them,” says Roads Director John Craig.

The department is letting the earmarked money sit in the federal treasury, along with another $20 million for an eastern Nebraska expressway and several million dollars for an I-80 interchange near Kearney. Nationally, some other state roads departments aren’t using millions of dollars Congress earmarked for road and bridge projects in the five-year highway bill, says the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Why? States must kick in 20% matching funds, which some roads officials say they don’t have and don’t want to spend because they view Congress’ pet projects as “low priority” on their rankings of road-building needs.

In many cases, they say, the earmarked money covers only a fraction of a project’s total cost. These road wars over earmarks, inserted by lawmakers into bills to steer federal money to their states, are intensifying concerns about a looming highway-funding crisis. Soaring construction costs, limited state budgets, increased traffic and decaying roads are pushing federal and state officials to seek new ways of financing road work nationwide. And in Nebraska, roads officials increasingly have become skeptical of federal earmarks.

Congress’ fondness for earmarking highway bills undermines confidence in decisions made at the federal and state level, says a new report by the congressionally chartered National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission. Other roads departments in the Midwest, for the most part, aren’t throwing up roadblocks on earmarks. But Craig says widening 136 miles of the Heartland Expressway to four lanes from South Dakota to Scottsbluff would cost $272 million. So far, about 65 miles of the expressway has been built in Nebraska.

State Sen. LeRoy Louden of Ellsworth said much of the expressway could be built for far less initially as a “super two,” where a third passing lane would be added only on hills, and later expanded into a four-lane border-to-border roadway.