Share the Burden or Ignore the Problem?

John D. Esparza's goal in this article is to convince the legislature not to change the taxes. It is assumed they are planning to leave a full burden on the trucks for all highway state taxes maintenance and repair. Many news articles I have read tend to claim that we should increase the cost of overweight-oversized permits to compensate for the damage done to Texas’ highways and bridges. This is clearly a response to the incident of the Minneapolis bridge mishap. He has successfully deemed a responsible party, the routing service, to allocate the responsibility of the trafficking of this potential danger. This explanation of the funds being allocated to the routing service to assure our safety was a plausible response to the accusations of wrongly funded money. It is then assumed by increasing the cost of permits we would not increase the funding for road maintenance, but expand the employment of the routing service.

Though many questions are answered, considering this information is coming from the Texas Motor Transportation Association, many ideas are half stated and not supported with additional information. One example is when he states, “Counties have the authority to obtain engineering data to make restrictions they need for their bridges as well (Esparza 1).” Many questions many come to mind. Are the counties required to extract the engineering data to review this information? Is this done on a regular and consistent basis? How is this regulated?

This article explains how trucks are committing a violation when crossing an unsafe bridge. He however does not supply us with the information on how often trucks cross unsafe bridges, how this is determined, or supply supporting information on the enforcement of this policy. Statistical data would have helped in this area.

Mr. Esparza then makes several generalized one sided assumptions without any factual data to support his argument. Some examples would be: “Should the Legislature act to impose the cost of highway maintenance on the trucking industry alone, no shipper could afford to move its goods on trucks (Esparza 1).” and “Infrastructure costs are so high that the public must participate (Esparza 1).” This may be true, but could a compromise be made where the trucking industry take more of the responsibility than they do now? How much would this raise their costs compared to what they spend now in taxes? In order to make a sound judgment, these ideas should be clearly interpreted and not approached with such a bias conclusion. In the end he bluntly states what has been done, but does not list any alternative options that might be possible.


Work cited
Esparza, John. Esparza: Share the burden to maintain highways 21 Sept. 2007 http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/09/21/0921esparza_edit.html