TRENTON – At $2 million a mile, New Jersey spends eight
times the national average on its state-controlled highways, a heavy toll that
is driving the tax-supported roadway fund dry and forcing officials to rethink
how roads are built.
New Jersey’s transportation project fund is nearly broke,
and a handful of voices are encouraging the state to think about economizing as
it refinances its ride.
Most of the talk has been about how to fund road and rail
work going forward — a higher gas tax, through the sales tax, probably some
borrowing.
The Reason Foundation says New Jersey spends just over $2
million per state-controlled mile on construction, maintenance and
administration, triple the roughly $675,000 spent by the next-highest state,
Massachusetts, and more than eight times the national average of $162,200. Its
pavement conditions nevertheless rank poorly, too, with the state’s only
positive ranking being the nation’s fifth-lowest fatality rate.
“This is out of control,” said Sen. Michael
Doherty, R-Warren, who made the report an issue at the state
Senate’s confirmation interview with new Transportation Commissioner Jamie Fox.
New Jersey funds highway, bridge and rail projects
through its Transportation Trust Fund, which relies on
borrowing and gas tax revenue to contribute $1.225 billion to the state’s
overall $1.6 billion construction budget this year. By June 30, the
fund will exhaust its capacity to borrow further and will be using all its
revenues to make payments on $14.4 billion in debt. The state controls 3,338
miles of road; the trust fund also provides aid to counties and municipalities.
“It’s just bad deals that have been made by politicians
who get political donations from unions. Project labor agreements and
prevailing wage artificially inflate the costs of road work,” said Daryn
Iwicki, state director for Americans for Prosperity. “New Jerseyans need
answers as to why we do the things that we do here.”
The reasons don’t lie solely with the higher costs for
union labor, said Sen. Paul Sarlo, D-Bergen, the chief operating officer
for Joseph M. Sanzari Inc., a major North Jersey general construction company.
The state’s dense population, high costs for acquiring land and the expenses
for relocating utilities are major factors, he said.
“That doesn’t happen in many states, in open areas. When
you open up a road, there’s so many more utilities,” Sarlo said. “Digging on a
street in Union City is a lot different than digging on a street out in Sussex
County. Let’s be honest with one another.”
The costs incurred when utilities relocate their
infrastructure to make way for road work are significant, Fox said. The
schedule can also interfere with road contractors’ efforts to finish work more
quickly.
“It is a problem. It was a problem when I was there the
last time,” said Fox, who served as transportation commissioner in 2002 under
Gov. James McGreevey. “The utility costs, relocation costs, is costing the
department and the state and the taxpayers a lot of money.”
Fox also agreed that the state’s population density
drives the cost higher. He advocated potential money-saving approaches such as public-private partnerships, under which private
contractors build a road that is then publicly operated. The contractors make
their profit either through tolls or by beating performance goals.
“We have to be tougher with negotiations. Small things
such as making sure when you have a development or a developer who’s building
something, they should be paying for part of the infrastructure improvements,”
Fox said, such as making developers pay for sound walls if they build housing
near an interstate highway.
Sen. Gerald Cardinale, R-Bergen, says costs are pushed
higher by requirements such as the state’s prevailing wage law. That’s been on
the books for more than a century and sets standards, such as salaries,
benefits and overtime, for public construction projects.
“It’s not just that we’re congested. It’s the way we do
things,” Cardinale said.
“What actually happens with prevailing wage is you get a
number of work rules and other factors coming into the process which raise the
cost,” he said. “There are studies which have shown that those raise the cost
about 40 percent. That’s not a small amount of money, and that causes us to get
less bang for our buck.”
Fox said he “philosophically agrees” with paying people a
prevailing wage. But he said work rules can “absolutely, positively” be changed
in ways that safely save money.
“I look at Ground Zero, for instance, when I was at the
Port Authority,” said Fox, who was deputy executive director of the Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey from 2004 to 2007. “You don’t need five
people to make sure that the guy’s walking up on the ladder correctly.
“You don’t want to reduce safety concerns, but at the
same time, yes, are there things that we can look at and have to look at in
order to make sure that the taxpayers are getting the best bang for their buck?
And do we have to change with the times and do maybe some work rules have to
change? Yes,” he said.
Greg Lalevee, business manager for International
Union of Operating Engineers Local 825 and a member of the
Transportation Trust Fund Authority, the financing agency for the state’s
transporation construction funding, said the fact is that it costs money to
build and rebuild roads while keeping traffic moving and construction workers
safe.
For instance, he said, Jersey barriers made of concrete
are erected, rather than orange cones, because some drivers will pull into a
construction site to ask for directions. When construction is done at night to
limit interference with commuters, safety precautions add to costs.
“New Jersey, just as a political entity, town, county,
state or country, is the most densely populated political entity on the
planet,” Lalevee said. “To engage in road construction here and to do it safely
really brings in a lot more stuff. Paving a road on 1&9 through Elizabeth
and Newark is fundamentally different from paving the same one-mile stretch of
highway in Nebraska.”
Michael Symons: (609) 984-4336; msymons@app.com
Total disbursements per state-controlled mile in 2012
New Jersey: $2,027,711
Massachusetts: $675,312
Florida: $572,337
Rhode Island: $533,614
California: $501,136
Weighted national average: $162,202 *
South Carolina: $39,403
* Results are weighted to take into account various
roadway sizes
Source: APP.com
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