Update: New details throughout, including some information on regional differences. Bottom line: This poll gives little support for higher transportation spending.
I’ve been away for a week tending to family business, and so this morning’s headline popped my eyes wide open: ‘Poll: Texas voters favor cutting highway funds first.’
The story, written by our veteran Austin bureau chief Christy Hoppe, puts into context the answers Texans gave to transportation-related questions in a poll conducted earlier this month (and paid for by The News and band of other major Texas newspapers. Details of the poll itself are here.)
Now truth be told, this hurt my feelings a bit: Only 1.6 percent of registered voters said they would base their choice in the primary on transportation. Far more were concerned about immigration and, especially, the state budget.
We also asked whether the anticipated state budget shortfall should be addressed by making cuts in highway spending, cuts in education, or cuts in heath services for the poor — or by raising fees or taxes.
A whopping 41 percent said they’d choose the first option — cuts in highway spending — over any of the others. The next favored option? Twenty percent said to raise taxes or fees.
Surprisingly, to me anyway, that number stayed fairly consistent across income levels, and was nearly identical for rural residents as it was for urban residents. Registered voters in Dallas and Fort Worth were slightly less likely to find savings by cutting highway spending, but not by that much: Instead of the 41 percent, those numbers here were 36 and 35, percent. Houston respondents? Forty-five percent of them said highway dollars should be cut first.)
Frankly, it’s hard to know what to make of those results. It does seem clear that transportation improvements don’t seem to be as high a priority for Texans in general as they are for the highway insiders we hear from most often on this blog.
Still, my own thinking starts with a note of caution: It’s not clear that cutting highway spending is an effective step to trimming a budget deficit anyway, since the majority of state spending on roads comes from the motor fuels tax, the uses of which are prescribed by the Constitution. (Education gets a 25 percent cut off the top, and the rest goes to highways or — controversially — is diverted to services only loosely related to highways, such as the Department of Public Safety. But loosely or not, the Constitution would prove an obstacle to taking gas tax funds to meaningfully address a deficit.)
We asked a second question, too, and it muddles the picture. Where, we asked, should the state get more money for transportation? This presumes, of course, that Texans want to spend more at all, but their answers were instructive nonetheless.
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