By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — The math is as simple as it is daunting.

Rhode Island needs approximately $600 million a year to fix and maintain its highways and bridges and otherwise operate the state Department of Transportation (RIDOT); its current revenue stream provides about $300 million.
Building a bridge over that budget gap is going to be even more difficult than fixing the one over the Pawtucket River, which, like several other spans around the state, now has weight restrictions that prohibit big trucks from crossing it.
So what is a Department of Transportation to do?
Spitballing ideas, the Blue Ribbon Panel for Transportation Funding has suggested tolls on Route 95 near the Connecticut line; tolls on I-95 closer to Providence; increased gas taxes; or hiking the sales tax.
Right now, says RIDOT Director Michael Lewis, all of those, along with a few others, are just suggestions. “Nobody has made any assessment of what is a good idea or what is a bad idea,” Lewis said.
Highway tolls are among the ideas under consideration, but Lewis said it is “premature” to discuss any idea as more or less likely than any other.
A big part of the problem, the director says, is that “we don’t use a sustainable model” for highway maintenance and improvements.
“Rhode Island is very dependent on the federal highway program, probably more so than any other state,” Lewis explained. “The federal program provides 80 percent of the cost of a project; we have to have 20 percent matching funds. We get approximately $200 million in federal highway money, we have to come up with 20 percent of that, which is about $40 million a year.”
The state borrows that money, so it has to pay debt service on that $40 million a year from its operating budget, which is also used to plow roads, sweep the highways, cut grass along the sides of the roads and in the medians, clear drains. Those funds come from the state’s gas tax and the debt service represents about half of what the state takes in from the gas tax each year.
And with people driving less because of the high cost of gasoline, the state is realizing less revenue from the gas tax.
The problem is not unique to Rhode Island, Lewis said; states across America are experiencing similar problems.
“The federal model can not sustain our needs,” he said, even though “the federal government still funds the majority of highway infrastructure development through the Highway Trust Fund. The states supply a portion of that.”
Rhode Island, Lewis said, is “the highest or second-highest” in the percentage of federal money that constitutes its entire budget. The feds, he said, put up the money for about 84 percent of Rhode Island’s transportation funding. The average for states across the nation is 30 percent.
RIDOT is planning a series of public meetings later this year at which they will lay out the state’s needs for highway and bridge improvements and the funding that is available, so people will be able to see the discrepancy between the two.
“We have to be able to articulate to the public that this is what our income is, and this is what it takes to meet our needs,” Lewis said. “We can not get all our bridges up to condition, get all these (weight restriction) postings off these bridges, keep people’s roads in good condition on the current funding stream that comes to RIDOT. It is not possible.”
Lloyd Albert, senior vice president for public affairs at AAA of Southern New England, is also a member of the blue ribbon panel.
He says AAA “as a general principle is opposed to (tolls) in any form.” If they are used, he said, it should be to increase highway capacity and the tolls should end once a project is paid for.
But he said RIDOT is in such a pinch that “we have to check out all the ideas and see which ones make sense.” He said the panel must be mindful that RIDOT has a shortfall of $300 million on an annual basis.
“That’s big money,” Albert said.
The solution, Albert predicted, “is probably going to be a marriage of rethinking the issue at the national level and getting states to face the problem head on.
“The old funding model at the national level is not working correctly,” he said, and even at the national level there is talk of gas tax increases, fee increases and tolls.
“I think we are facing an absolutely critical issue in this country,” Lewis said, “and the timing is not great to deal with this as we face very challenging economic times.”