Wisconsin road problems worse than thought, solution still far away

It doesn’t seem possible, but it is worse than we thought. A new report finds Wisconsin roads to be the fourth worst in the nation. And more shockingly, the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau finds that the work we have done on the state’s roads have gone well over budget. In fact, the report finds that the actual cost of road projects in Wisconsin from 2006 to 2015 ending up costing double the original estimates. But it gets worse. The costs were higher not because of some unforeseen rises in the cost of blacktop, but because of incompetence at the DOT. Apparently the people in charge aren’t all that good at math, and the cost overruns were due to the fact that DOT planners failed to take into account the cost of inflation had on the actual costs. So, our roads are crumbling, we don’t have a sustainable system to pay for them, we are paying for the roads we do build on a credit card, and the people who map out our road needs can’t add. Not a pretty picture. This underscores the need for Governor Walker and lawmakers to make tackling this problem a priority. Walker needs to abandon his no new tax for roads pledge, which may be politically expedient, but it does nothing to solve this growing problem.