As road money declines, salt, labor cost more

By SILU GUO
Capital News Service
LANSING – State and local transportation agencies face a steady decrease in road funding and an increase in costs, and no short-term solution is likely. “We are at a critical point,” said Bob Felt of the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) Office of Communications. “We may not have enough state funding.”
According to MDOT, state level transportation funding has been decreasing for the past 10 years and will continue to drop until 2015. “It peaked in 2004 and kept declining after that,” Felt said. Receipts from gasoline taxes, diesel taxes, vehicle registration fees and other revenues are the main sources of the state’s transportation funding, had fallen to less than $1.86 billion in fiscal year 2012.