By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — Working to design a comprehensive, integrated transportation policy for the state, rather than dealing separately with highway and bridge work, RIPTA, the airports, the ports in Providence and at Quonset Point, and commuter rail, the House Finance Committee opened what promises to be a series of hearings with the various departments and agencies Tuesday.

The next time the panel meets — after the Nov. 4 election and after the revenue and caseload estimating process ends Nov. 10, members decided — they will gather the heads of all six transportation-related agencies (DOT, RIPTA, Turnpike and Bridge Authority, the Airport Corporation, ports and commuter rail) for a discussion of the Big Picture in Ocean State transportation.
“This is to set the stage for a broad transportation policy,” Chairman Steven Costantino said. “There are a whole bunch of routes in RIPTA, there are different airports in the state. We will get into specifics at some point in the next few months to get into the specific agencies and their policies and their allocation of funds.”
“We’re kind of getting tired of putting Band-aids on things,” agreed Transportation Subcommittee Chairman John Patrick Shanley of South Kingstown, who ran the meeting. “We’re not a first-aid station. We are supposed to delegate broad policy. The General Assembly is supposed to be a legislature that makes long term programs and I know this is not just a transportation issue, this is a Rhode Island issue.
“I think the big questions we are dealing with are how much of this is need-driven, how much coordination is there, how much communication is there, and lastly a major question that should come up, and hopefully it will, is how much parochialism do we have? Because we do have a substantial amount of parochialism in this state and people tend to look at what is in their neighborhood or what is in their town or whatever.”
The briefing committee members received at the start of the hearing from House Budget Analyst John-Paul Verducci was bleak.
He told the lawmakers that the state Department of Transportation (DOT) says that it will not have adequate funding to maintain its roads and bridges; that the state Turnpike and Bridge Authority won’t have sufficient revenues to adequately maintain the Newport Pell and Mount Hope bridges; that RIPTA  has a closing deficit, a current year deficit and projected outyear deficits, and that AMTRAK wants the state to be responsible for any insurance or other financial exposure if the state wants to use its tracks to extend commuter rail to Wickford.
RIPTA estimates its deficit at about $12 million. DOT thinks it will need $639.5 million each year to keep highways and bridges in good repair, but expects to have just $354 million each year to do the work.  That leaves a shortfall of $285.4 million for highway construction every year into the foreseeable future.
DOT gets more than 60 percent of its funding each year from the federal government and floats bonds to meet the state matching funds required to get the federal money.
One area the committee will study is do “earmarks” -- money set aside for certain projects in federal funding legislation – wind up driving the transportation policies of the individual states.
“In my recollection you have never been faced with virtually every transportation agency coming to you and saying we need money, all simultaneously,” said House Fiscal Advisor Michael O’Keefe. “It’s always been RIPTA, or maybe a couple of years later something at DOT, rarely has it come all at once like it has this time.”
On the commuter rail question, O’Keefe said, “the question you have to ask is how much risk you want to accept before  it is no longer worth expanding.”
Pawtucket Rep. Betsy Dennigan asked whether the various agencies “ever get together to collaborate, with an eye toward consolidating the use of attorneys or bond counsel or media and public relations.
“I think it is important that we are having this conversation,” she said. “It leads to more questions.”
“I seriously think we should bring everyone together,” Pawtucket Rep. William San Bento said. “I’ve got bridges I’m concerned about. I’ve got RIPTA I’m concerned about. I’m concerned about the Airport Corporation, are they ever going to get to expand those runways, and if not, let’s move on. I don’t want to throw good money away.
“The major thing to me,” San Bento continued, “is we’ve got a bridge in Pawtucket (on Route 95), I don’t know how safe that bridge is. I don’t know how much longer it will stand up. And I would like to have DOT come in and explain to me what’s happening with that bridge and how long before it is going to be safe.”
Verducci posed the question of whether there should be a single “overarching funding authority” that sets priorities among all the diverse transportation projects and allocates the money.
O’Keefe said that was briefly considered in the past.
“You may recall that, somewhere in the last 10 years, that idea surfaced of a super transportation funding structure, it was probably back in 1996 or ‘97,” he said. “It never got fully explored.”