Clouse gives legislative preview

Road repairs, pay raises and prisons were among the topics State District 93 Rep. Steve Clouse discussed at the Coffee and Conversation event held Monday, March 18, at the historic Holman House in Ozark.

Hosted by the Ozark Area Chamber of Commerce, the public was invited to the morning event for an opportunity to hear the House Budget Committee Chairman’s thoughts going into the 2019 state legislative session.

Gov. Kay Ivey had called the legislators into a special session March 6 through 12 during which a proposed gas tax increase to fund road and bridge construction was approved. “I know the gas tax is controversial and a lot of people didn’t understand a lot of the mechanics of it but certainly the need (for funds to repair the state’s aging roads and bridges) was there,” Clouse said about the increase which will be phased in over three years and then indexed to construction costs.

Clouse said that what led to the decision to move forward with a solution to the aging roads and bridges was the fact that there are some 36 states, to include Florida, Tennessee, Georgia and Mississippi, that have already addressed the subject of infrastructure.

“It was not only from an economic development standpoint—to bring industry in and maintain the industry we’ve got—it was also becoming a public safety issue,” Clouse said. “Particularly when you get into a rural area where a lot of school buses are traveling.

“There are 16,000 bridges in the state and half of them are at least 50 years old—and that is the lifespan of a bridge—without having had anything done to them,” Clouse explained. “There are many bridges that aren’t passable with weight limits on them and school buses have to go different directions which costs the schools more money. More importantly, children’s lives are endangered because the more miles you travel the greater percentage of probability of having something go wrong.

“The cost of doing nothing was not nothing,” Clouse stressed. “The cost of doing nothing was going backwards.

“Kicking the can down the road on this particular issue meant, in a lot of areas, you might not have a road to kick the can down,” Clouse said. “This was needed.”

Clouse said that the implementation process includes raising the gas tax by six cents a gallon starting in September. In October 2020, the tax would go up another two cents. In October 2021, it would go up another two cents. The indexing would potentially start in October 2023. “It is based on the National Highway Construction Cost index,” Clouse said.

Clouse said that the state will get approximately 67 percent of the funds generated, municipalities will get 8 percent and the counties will get 25 percent.

Clouse said that the state funds will go towards a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to accept a three-to-one federal dollar match to widen and deepen the Port of Mobile. Currently large ships and barges cannot enter the Port of Mobile as easily as they can enter ports in Houston, Texas, or Miami, Fla.

New Orleans, La., and Savannah, Ga., are in the process of widening and deepening their ports but they have only obtained 50-50 federal fund matches, Clouse said.

“The bottom line is we are getting a three-to-one (federal funds) match because of (United States Senator) Richard Shelby and his position on the Appropriations Committee,” Clouse said. “So this is sort of a once in a life time opportunity for us and if we hadn’t have acted we would have lost the opportunity to get this three-to-one match to deepen the 43-foot deep port at least 50 feet and to widen it.

“This project is not just for Mobile, it’s the whole state that is benefitting,” Clouse said, explaining that currently goods from Alabama are having to be shipped out of ports outside of the state. “We’re about to become the Number 2 producer of automobiles in the country so it’s a great opportunity for Alabama to get this port retrenched and widened.”

After the Port of Mobile project is completed, the state’s portion of the gas tax funds will go into the road and bridge account, Clouse said.

All the funds generated by the gas tax will go into a separate account, Clouse said, and the counties will be held accountable for the specific projects that the money is being spent on via a public access website. “It’s going to be very transparent,” Clouse said. “All the funds will be going to repair of roads and bridges.”

The revenues in both the general fund and the education fund budgets “have been very good this last year,” Clouse said. “The governor proposed a 4 percent pay raise for education employees. I’m looking for that to pass.”

The governor is also supporting a 2 percent pay raise for state employees, Clouse said. “I think we will be able to manage that. I think we’ll be able to make sure that health insurance costs do not go up on state employees.”

Clouse said that the state still faces a directive from a federal judge to improve prison conditions. He said that a company has been hired to come up with a realistic plan of action for the legislators to consider.

An Ozark native, Clouse is a seventh term state legislator representing Dale County and parts of Houston County.