Highway-upgrade plan piques interest

BOISE – North Idaho legislators said Wednesday that they’re intrigued by Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s proposal to use bonds to step up highway construction in Idaho, including a major upgrade of U.S. Highway 95.

“It merits consideration,” said Sen. John Goedde, R-Coeur d’Alene, who has pushed for upgrading the accident-prone north-south highway.

“It seems like a good concept – certainly the highway needs a lot of work,” said Rep. George Sayler, D-Coeur d’Alene. “Having just driven from Lewiston, I know that there are some spots that aren’t too good. At this point I like the sound of it, but I want to see more.”

Idaho lawmakers tend to be leery of proposals that will put the state into debt, but the new proposal Kempthorne is working on wouldn’t borrow against state tax revenues. Instead, it would use a type of bonding authorized by Congress in 1995 that allows states to borrow against their future federal highway allocations.

Fourteen states now use the so-called GARVEE bonds, an acronym that stands for Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicle. Four more states have authorized the bonds but have not used them yet. Most of the states are back East, but they include California, Arizona and Colorado, which used the bonds to finance a major upgrade of its interstate system in the Denver metropolitan area.

Chuck Winder, chairman of the Idaho Transportation Board, said the bonds work through a process that essentially buys insurance on their repayment through congressional allocations, rather than relying on a state’s credit rating.

“It’s not that costly, because they don’t think there’s that great of a risk of the federal government going broke or the highway program going away,” Winder said.

Idaho gets about $200 million a year in federal highway funding, and it has received substantial sums of money every year since at least 1918.

“The state doesn’t have to guarantee the debt, nor does the federal government,” Winder said. “It’s not any new money – it’s basically trying to do things quicker.”

Kempthorne noted that despite the Legislature’s traditional caution about bonding, he successfully persuaded lawmakers to use bonds to build new buildings on college campuses across the state.

“I was told that was dead on arrival,” the governor said. “We just showed tenacity. Now I think the case is made.”

The college bonding proposal ended up passing the Legislature overwhelmingly, and every North Idaho lawmaker except one voted for it. The lone dissenter was Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries.

The statewide plan paid for the sorely needed new health sciences building now going in at North Idaho College, along with a new classroom center at the University of Idaho and more.

“It’s an example of a public works project that we were able to accelerate,” Kempthorne said. “In that instance, we took a decade’s worth of buildings and we built them now, so that we have immediate use of them. In that vein, I want to do another dynamic initiative that will connect the state.”

The governor said he’ll unveil the specifics in his State of the State message to lawmakers in January as they open their legislative session.

Rep. George Eskridge, R-Dover, said he’s excited about the prospect of fixing Highway 95, but has concerns about how bonding would work.

“I’m not sold on it yet, and I voted for the bonds for the schools,” Eskridge said. “I’ve yet to see how it might impede our flexibility” as various road needs come up.

But, he said, “I am concerned about Highway 95 and financing that infrastructure. I think it’s important No. 1 for safety, and No. 2, as he said, for connecting our state.”

Plus, Eskridge said a better north-south highway would provide economic benefits for every community along the route, which stretches from the Canadian border to southwestern Idaho.

Eskridge said he “took a little convincing” to support the college bonding project, “but I liked the idea in that particular case. We needed those buildings, and it was at a time when the economic shot locally from the construction would be a big plus. … We did a good thing for the education system, and at the same time we did something good for the community.”

“You could use, admittedly, the same argument for highway construction,” Eskridge said.

Goedde said he, too, wants to see details before committing, but he’s long been concerned about the safety of Idaho’s only north-south highway.

“Those areas of Highway 95 that still follow the roadbed that was put out in 1939 are no longer adequate – there’s an extreme safety situation in many of those areas,” Goedde said. “Cars simply didn’t go as fast and trucks weren’t as big in 1939. So the highway has not been upgraded to meet modern expectations of a highway.”

Goedde also points to the troubled highway as a cause of the longstanding “psychological division between north and south” in Idaho. “I think a major portion of that is because there is no good all-season highway to get residents from North Idaho to the Capitol, without going through two other states,” he said. “So it seems like we’re the ugly stepchild up here.”

Winder said the plan still is being developed, but could potentially include moving up such major projects as going to four lanes from Lewiston to Moscow, and possibly all the way from Lewiston to Coeur d’Alene, and upgrading the route north of Coeur d’Alene to Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry.

Winder said moving up projects could save money by doing them at today’s prices, rather than waiting as costs escalate due to inflation. Plus, he said, they’d save lives by improving safety.

Kempthorne said his proposal will look at major road construction projects all over the state, not just on Highway 95. “Virtually every part of the state will see the benefit,” he said.