Funding to fix CT’s roads and bridges is drying up, and officials don’t have a solution

Keith M. Phaneuf and Kasturi Pananjady While the coronavirus dominated summer headlines, Connecticut’s five-year effort to accelerate the transportation rebuilding program slowed to a stroll on July 1.

A risky initiative to force tolls — by borrowing and spending billions of extra dollars on new projects between 2016 and 2020 — concluded July 1, without those controversial fees or any other plan to pay for all of it.

Now Connecticut is left with a $2.8 billion bill, a cash-starved Special Transportation Fund headed toward insolvency, and a construction industry poised to shrink even as the state struggles with unprecedented unemployment.

Unless Gov. Ned Lamont and the legislature order more revenue for transportation — a risky proposition as they near a new state election cycle — construction and labor leaders say Connecticut’s aging and congested highways, bridges and rail lines are at risk of further deterioration.

And the administration already has begun to delay transfers of funds to the transportation building program, something advocates say will only postpone projects.

“Once we get out to the next several years, nothing is [fully] funded,” said Nate Brown, vice president of the Connecticut State Building Trades Council. “It’s a construction industry issue statewide, and the men and women who rely on that as a living could have some really severe consequences going forward.”

“It’s going to significantly hamper the state’s ability to make any progress at all,” Don Shubert, president of the Connecticut Construction Industry Association, warning that construction contractors and workers could soon migrate to other states to find employment. “The construction industry pulls back as soon as it recognizes uncertainty. Drastic cuts like this cause deep adjustments in the industry.”

Now, faced with the overlapping problems of more debt to pay off, more infrastructure needs, the lack of a new revenue source and less of an appetite to borrow, the state’s transportation funding situation is dire. There are not many ways out of the jam.

State funding for highway, bridge repairs plummets

These “drastic cuts” center around slightly more than $900 million Connecticut is expected to borrow this year for transportation work. 

That’s down a whopping $711 million, or 44%, from last year, the final stage of the five-year “ramp-up” launched in 2015 under then-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

Transportation borrowing, which enables Connecticut to qualify for federal construction grants, is paid for by the Special Transportation Fund — which is supported largely with two fuel taxes and a share of sales tax receipts.

Last year, Connecticut funneled nearly $2.5 billion into its capital program, chiefly through state borrowing and federal grants. This year, the projected total is $1.64 billion.

Further complicating matters, the state saved $74 million this fiscal year by waiting longer to borrow funds for infrastructure work.

Making the DOT wait longer for less money helps keep borrowing costs down as the bill for the “ramp-up” comes due. But it also will slow infrastructure repairs, Shubert and Brown noted — an odd prospect given that Malloy, Lamont and other leaders have warned constantly that the rebuilding was proceeding too slowly and barely maintaining a state of good repair.

“The key to an efficient transportation program is long-term, dedicated, dependable funding,” Shubert said. “As soon as you break from that, it affects the DOT’s ability to plan and deliver projects immensely.”

Bonding backlog explodes over the past decade, costing tens of thousands of jobs

Delays in transportation funding are nothing new in Connecticut.

When Malloy took office in 2011, the state had $1.7 billion in approved financing for transportation, but it hadn’t actually borrowed the money — partly because it couldn’t afford to make the debt payments on it.

By the time Lamont succeeded Malloy in 2019, the amount approved but not borrowed was up to $3.8 billion.

The bonding backlog now stands just shy of $4.4 billion.

Every $1 billion in stalled bonding translates into 10,000 construction and related jobs that could have been created, said Fred V. Carstensen, who heads the University of Connecticut’s economic think-tank. 

“Clearly one of the things that is hamstringing the state’s economy is that we have bad infrastructure,” he said. “Now you’re putting austerity on top of that?”

But things weren’t supposed to be like this. Malloy’s “ramp up” was never supposed to ramp down.

To cover part of the ramp-up’s debt costs, Malloy and legislators dedicated more sales tax revenues to transportation — just not enough to cover the whole bill.

But the linchpin of Malloy’s “Let’s GO CT!” plan was that by 2020, state officials would have embraced tolls — or some other new funding source. With that money, Connecticut not only could have maintained the accelerated pace of repairs but enhanced it further. 

The governor formed a study panel to spend a year figuring out how to cover the long-term costs. Meanwhile, the ramp-up went forward while the administration dreamed big.

Under Malloy, the DOT established a “vision level” annual investment in infrastructure of $3.2 billion per year, enough to maintain safety and make various strategic improvements to relieve congestion.

CT Slams the brakes on funds for transportation construction

A five-year program to "ramp up" Connecticut’s meager transportation building program expired quietly last summer. Launched in 2015 to accelerate overdue repairs until lawmakers approved tolls or some other new revenue source, it was the linchpin of a plan to push annual construction funding upward toward a “vision level” of $3.2 billion. But legislators subsequently rejected tolls and the expired ramp-up now must be paid off, even as dollars for highway and bridge work evaporate. 

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