Arkansas House Looking for a Consensus on Roads

LITTLE ROCK (AP) — After giving Gov. Mike Huckabee's interstate improvement plan its unanimous approval, the House tax panel will struggle toward a semi-consensus on fixing the rest of Arkansas' bad roads.

What else ultimately reaches the full House, if anything, will be a catch-all compromise to let Arkansas voters decide whether getting major highways and local roads fixed is worth an extra

uarter-or-so per fill-up.

The trucking industry has graciously agreed with chip in — through a 3-cent a gallon diesel tax increase imposed incrementally over three years — to help repay proceeds from Huckabee's $575 million bond issue that would be used to rebuild interstates that are crumbling under the girth of heavy trucks.

The governor needs simple House and Senate majorities to refer the bond deal to the people, and 75 percent majorities to pass the diesel tax hike, which would not be collected unless Arkansans approve the bond issue at a special election.

However, lawmakers representing districts along rural highways are complicating matters with their demand for improvements on the roads their constituents travel.

Mostly, they want to speed up major road projects still languishing from the last successful big highway program, a 1991 plan for $2.5 billion worth of new and improved highways over 15 years.

Huckabee's proposal would leave those projects, on some of which nothing has been done, on a slow track. It would leave dregs — about $3 million a year — for cities and counties from the diesel tax and local government officials support it.

Local governments would get much more, as much as $17 million annually, from two other proposals that did not die in defeat by the House Revenue and Taxation Committee last week but were left mortally wounded.