Council to vote on supporting #JustFixItWI

Resolution calls for better funding structure for road repairs.

Without actually calling for an increase in the Wisconsin gas tax, La Crosse is kind of calling for an increase in the gas tax. 

This week, the La Crosse city council will vote on support for the Just Fix It resolution – basically saying raising taxes is necessary to fund needed road repairs.

“That trickles down into the counties, it trickles down into the cities,” council president Martin Gaul said. “Everybody’s trying to deal with the same issues and, frankly, I don’t think that borrowing all this money is the way to go.”

The council, of course, cannot raise the gas tax but it can vote to support such an increase.

“We need to address this in many different ways, including the gas tax and possibly some license fee increases,” Gaul said. “There’s a lot of things that need to be explored, but we have a problem in this state and fixing that problem starts in Madison.”

The Fix It Resolution is being promoted by the very influential Transportation Development Association lobbying group.

The resolution is meant to pressure state lawmakers into agreeing to new funding to fix state roads.  

“The bottom line here is that, unfortunately, a lot of the main thoroughfare going through the city of La Crosse that are in such poor condition are the responsibility of the state to fix,” Gaul said.

Additional borrowing, as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has suggested, doesn’t seem to Gaul like such a good idea.