Gov. Rick Perry delivered his signature anti-Washington, states’ rights rhetoric to a packed theater at the National Conference for State Legislatures in San Antonio Wednesday, lauding Texas as the “epicenter of job growth,” pointing to 40 percent increase of new U.S. jobs created in the state as proof.

Perry has been fond of peddling that figure on his way to a likely presidential bid, but as the Texas Independent has previously reported, it’s a misleading measure of Texas’ jobs.

While the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has said the state accounted for 37 percent of net U.S. job creation since June 2009, the number of the lowest-paying jobs in Texas has jumped drastically. The state is home to the greatest number of employees working at or below the federal minimum wage compared to any state; in 2010 about 550,000 Texans were working at or below minimum wage ($7.25 per hour in 2010). California — which Perry often is fond of comparing Texas against — has among the smallest number of minimum wage workers at less than 2 percent.

Perry’s job growth argument accounts for no state income tax, but fails to include central economic factors that influence the Texas economy such as Texas’ rich natural resources, energy and high-tech industries and successful Gulf port businesses. Also missing from his speech was mention of the structural deficit built into Texas’ budget, including the one he pushed this Legislative session that cut billions to social services, health and nursing care and public education and has left thousands unemployed.

Perry attacked what he considers federal government intrusion and suggested states — as “individual laboratories of innovation” — take full reign, echoing the anti-D.C. argument in his book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington.”

“Government doesn’t create jobs, otherwise that last two and half years of stimulus woulda worked,” said Perry. “Government can only create the environment that allows the private sector to create jobs.”

The governor also took the opportunity to link the recent U.S. credit rating downgrade by Standard & Poor’s to the “culmination of reckless culture” of overzealous spending in D.C. The cuts that came with the Washington debt deal, said Perry, were not enough.

“The federal government has tried to spend its way out of this economic spiral which has only deepened the crisis, deepened our debt,” Perry said. “Until Washington understands the only true stimulus is more money in the hands of employers, as well as a restrained bureaucracy that is no longer overreaching into the workplace, our national nightmare will continue.”

Despite the $27 billion deficit the Texas Legislature faced this year, and some $15 billion in cuts to areas including basic social services and public education, Perry praised Texas for making do with $15 billion less than the previous budget while keeping taxes low and preserving the state’s Rainy Day Fund, a reserve used in times of economic crisis.

While Perry places Texas on a pedestal for job development, hundreds of thousands of jobs are expected to be lost in the next two to three years, as a result of the sweeping and historic cuts to the Texas budget, advocated by Perry.

Huge slashes to Medicaid and health and human services marked the Texas budget, as well as some $4 billion sliced from public education, forcing about 12,000 teachers out of work so far, with up to 100,000 out a job in coming months.

Most highway construction and maintenance today gets paid for at the pump, in the form of gas and diesel taxes, both state and federal. So how will electric cars pay their share?

For now, they are driving for free, save for license and registration fees. And that’s something that advocates of mileage-based user fees believe they can use to their benefit as they push for a restructuring of highway financing.

With minor modifications, GPS and other existing technology can enable governments to implement mileage-based user fees. Public acceptance, however, remains distant, said speakers at a recent Texas Transportation Institute conference held in Breckenridge.

Ed Regan, of Wilbur Smith Associates, a transportation and infrastructure consultancy, said he expects the first pilot projects involving interstate tolling to begin by 2015, followed by more managed lane traffic situations, such as is found in the so-called Lexus Lane along Interstate 25 in Denver.

Gradually, Regan predicted, user fees based on distances traveled will be adopted, becoming ubiquitous by 2025. And the states will lead the way, he said, because they are most at risk.

For the last century, fuel taxes have carried nearly the full weight of building and maintaining the nation’s vast network of highways. A pivotal agreement came in 1956 when federal legislators, led by Sen. Albert Gore Sr., of Tennessee, forged a compromise that enabled the federal government to pay 90 percent of the cost of constructing the nation’s interstate network, which cost $425 billion in 2006 dollars.

Completion of the last segment of interstate highway, I-70 through Colorado’s Glenwood Canyon, was celebrated in 1992 – coincidentally the same year that Colorado last increased the gas tax. The last increase in federal gas tax was in 1993. The last increases on diesel fuel occurred at about the same time.

In January 2011, motor gasoline taxes averaged 48.1 cents per gallon across the nation and diesel fuel taxes averaged 53.1 cents per gallon.

State and federal taxes combined were once about 50 percent of the total cost of fuel, but now they’re just 17 percent, said Allaudin Khan, from the Nevada Department of Transportation. “That tells a compelling story,” he said.

Proponents of mileage-based user vehicle taxes, also called vehicles-miles-traveled taxes, also point to the improving fuel economy of cars, now mandated to increase to an average of 35.5 miles per gallon.

As revenues from fuel taxes have stagnated, costs of construction, operation and maintenance have spiked.

Congress has taken to subsidizing highways with transfers from the general fund, $70 billion altogether between 2008 and 2010, counting expenditures embedded in stimulus bills, according to an October 2010 report from the Rand Corp. titled “System Trials to Demonstrate Mileage-Based Road Use Charges.”

With sagging revenues, 16 states have now looked at mileage-based revenue sources, although bills – all of them defeated — have been introduced in just four states. In a fifth state, Missouri, a bill was proposed to expressly prohibit mileage-based fees, according to Nick Farber, of the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures. That bill, too, got nowhere.

All have died, the most recent being an Oregon bill that proposed to apply mileage-based fees to electric vehicles. It was opposed by the auto industry.

While academics, bureaucrats and even some politicians are starting to talk about alternative revenue structures for highways, the public isn’t sold – or even persuaded there’s a problem.

“It doesn’t matter how many Rand studies or commissions suggest a new way of doing things. At the end of the day, a congressman or senator has to go back home and explain to his constituents the need for a new device,” said Alex Herrgott, an aide to U.S. Senator James M. Imhofe, R-OK.

In Texas, an exploratory study conducted by state officials found broad public resistance. In one small town, local residents stressed that “government doesn’t belong in my car,” said John Sabala, of the Texas Department of Transportation. The attitude, he joked, was similar to the one that “government keep its hands off my Medicare.”

The many concerns expressed by residents all add up to “no VMT in Texas, at least for now,” said Sabala. To sell it to the public, he endorsed the idea of a pilot program based on electric vehicles, to overcome concerns about privacy, equitability and a fundamental distrust of government.

Constituency groups are leery, or at least cautious. Darrin Roth, director of highway operations for the American Trucking Association, said truckers support a gas tax increase but fear a mileage-based user system might be engineered to assess higher charges for special cargoes, such as hazardous fuels.

Jill Ingrassia, representing AAA, the giant consumer automobile group, said her group and others support consideration of new financing mechanisms, but has concerns about the privacy, cost, accountability and transparency of mileage-based fees. Despite steady efforts by AAA and others during the last decade, the public doesn’t understand the current funding system, doesn’t trust that revenues are being invested wisely, and is unconvinced of the need to pay more.

She expressed “cautious” support of a pilot program that targets electric vehicles. “I do believe that this effort is more likely to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary,” she said.

Technology does not seem to be a major barrier. Insurers have already begun to collect data about driver use, in order to better assess risks and offer benefits. Drivers who refrain from driving after midnight on Saturday, for example, could be offered lower rates. Insurers can collect much more information about driver behaviors – including locations and time of day – than they currently are willing to use, because of Big Brother concerns about privacy.

Research conducted by the University of Iowa, however, indicates that privacy concerns are not insurmountable. The study profiled 2,511 people in the United States who matched age, travel and other demographic characteristics of the broader population. The experiment installed mileage-tracking devices in their vehicles for use in 22 million miles of traffic.

The practical experience won over many users. At the outset, 42 percent were favorably disposed toward mileage-based user fees. At the end, it was 70 percent. Contrary to perceptions, older people were no more worried about privacy than younger people – although a third want minimal travel data collected, said Paul Hanley, director of the school’s Transportation Policy Research Group.

Instead of a split between rural and urban residents, the Iowa study found more support among those who drive little, no matter where they live, and opposition from higher-mileage drivers.

But rural drivers do tend to drive more. A Congressional Budget Office study earlier this year found that rural drivers averaged 44 miles per day, compared to 11 miles per day for urban drivers, said Terri Binder, who chairs the transportation committee of Club 20, the Western Slope advocacy group in Colorado. She also noted that rural incomes are generally lower and the distances to doctors from such towns as Naturita, west of Telluride, are often 100 miles or more. She also fretted about impacts to tourism.

Still, states are giving the idea a harder look. A blue ribbon panel appointed by former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter sifted through 38 revenue-increasing ideas, including mileage-based fees, but recommended only that a pilot study be conducted. The Colorado Department of Transportation and other Colorado agencies were well represented at the conference.

Oregon has already conducted such a study, and Minnesota in August will launch a $4.1 million rubber-meets-the-road test of mileage-based taxes. The 500 participants will be given stipends of $200, and then they will have to pay, based on the mileage recorded on their odometers via smart phones attached via blue toggles. Information will be dispatched to a cloud-based data warehouse. They will “pay” 5 cents a mile, but lesser rates for travel on interstates, late at night, and other situations.

All the hardware is off the shelf, with the major work being in software development. “There’s no reason that a Blackberry or an iPhone or any other smart phone couldn’t do this,” said Bennet Pierce, project leader of the Battelle Co., a research and development charitable trust that has contracted to conduct the experiment.

Minnesota officials are keenly interested in administrative costs. Hardware costs are minimal. “This is a very real world demonstration,” Pierce said.

Advocates can also turn to several other places in the world for experience. Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have introduced automated truck tolls based on travel distance and vehicle size or weight. New Zealand has introduced a system that applies to trucks as well as diesel-fueled cars.

A challenge is avoiding the expensive installation of equipment on existing vehicles. Its takes about 15 years for vehicle fleets to be replaced. But already, 17 percent of vehicles in the United States are equipped for electronic tolling, and that should reach 40 percent by 2025, even without mandates, said Regan, the consultant.

Looking forward, advocates see a key challenge being to persuade the public that highways are not free. “There are no free roads, but if in fact you talk to anybody in the general public, other than toll roads, they see any road as a free road,” said Mark Muriella, assistant director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Others say mileage-based fees must be kept simple, at least at the start. While the existing technology could be used to assess drivers based on time of day and road segment, something called congestion pricing, that’s not the place to start, said Muriella.

Pricing needs to be the last thing brought to the public’s attention, said Bruce Schaller, deputy commissioner, planning and sustainability for the New York City Department of Transportation. It should be all about benefits to drivers,” he said of the messaging.

Many of the 100-plus attendees expressed support for targeting electric vehicles, even if that conflicts with broader societal goals more easily achieved by vehicle electrification.

Participants also agreed broadly that, similar to energy transformations, efforts should be focused on the state level, with the presumption that eventually the government will be forced to institute standards to allow common platforms across multiple states, which is called interoperability.

States may also want to share pilot projects because, as a representative of the Colorado Department of Transportation pointed out, C-DOT has only $600,000 appropriated annually for research. If 10 or 15 states get together, they could pool their research efforts, he said.

And, concluded another: “We can’t start this conversation about taxes. It has to be about benefits.”

Allen Best is editor/publisher of Mountain Town News.

The $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition, which has been billed as U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s greatest tool for reform, will grant stimulus funds to states that develop comprehensive reform strategies in four areas:  standards and assessments, data systems, teacher hiring, firing and evaluation, and turning around struggling schools. Duncan has made it clear that the money will not be divided equally among the states.

In this high-stakes environment, the Gates offer of help with the application process could be key for states like Colorado, which the New Teacher Project has ranked(pdf), along with 15 other states, as “competitive” in the race (a change from an earlier “somewhat competitive” rating for Colorado). The nonprofit ranked just two states, Florida and Louisiana, as “highly competitive.”

According to the AP, to be eligible for Gates Foundation funds, states will have to meet eight criteria. Among other things, they’ll have to demonstrate the ability to link student testing data to teachers and demonstrate clear support for a proposed common standards effort.

The Gates Foundation move apparently comes in response to criticism over the Foundation’s announcement last summer that it had handpicked 15 states for a $250,000 grant toward creating a strong Race to the Top application.

Critics argued the move indicated a too-close-for-comfort relationship between the Gates Foundation and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s office. And some, like the National Conference of State Legislatures, felt that the Gates Foundation, not the U.S. government, would end up actually picking the winners.

From the New York Times:

“We expressed concerns that it appeared that Gates people were involved in helping the department pick winners and losers,” said David Shreve, federal affairs counsel at the national conference.

So will Colorado apply for the funds? In an email to the Colorado Independent, Evan Dreyer, spokesman for Gov. Bill Ritter, said that the state hasn’t yet seen any specific application guidance from the Gates Foundation yet, so he couldn’t say for certain.

“However, we are interested in seeking as much support as possible,” said Dreyer, “so if we are eligible we likely would apply.”

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Photo/Miss_Colleen, Flickr)

“We’re such a die-hard initiative state,” said state Rep. Lois Court, a Denver Democrat who has been watching the ballot initiative process in Colorado for the past two decades. “We believe strongly in direct democracy here … but the initiative process needs fixing.”

Court says the state’s infamous monster ballots, where lists of candidates are supplemented by growing numbers of complicated paragraph-titles describing proposed laws, are just a symbol.

“We just make way too much law in Colorado. That’s the basics of it. And it’s not the best way to make law.”

When “direct democracy” doesn’t work
Court says that Colorado may have finally reached a tipping point on the issue and that citizens may be ready to accept reform. Amendments like the state’s famous Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights or TABOR, which strictly shapes how lawmakers can raise revenue and complicates stand-alone constitutional and statutory spending requirements, like Amendment 23, exemplify the problem.

“It’s a fundamental question about the kind of government the founders of the country established. They designed a democratic republic, where the people have the ultimate sovereignty but where the people elect representatives to make decisions in their place.

“If we in Colorado agree on that, then we can agree also that we are now struggling to function according to that design. Right now we’re at a bit of loggerheads. As lawmakers, on so many issues our hands are tied and our ability to make government work is increasingly diminished.”

State lawmakers address petition fraud
Court has sponsored a ballot-initiative reform bill, H.B. 1326, with House Speaker Terrance Carroll this month, legislation that would better clarify the enigmatic initiative process and restore integrity by preventing fraud. The strong bipartisan support for the bill underlines a growing consensus among leaders in the state that “direct democracy” here — where laws are passed by voters at the ballot box rather than by elected officials in the legislature — has become a problem.

Most analysts agree that fraud is tainting the petition process, where signatures are gathered in support of placing initiatives on the ballot. Indeed, petitioning problems have been widely reported, some of the instances glaring. At a hearing in March, Carroll and Court introduced their reform bill with video of a 14-year-old girl being paid to gather signatures in clear violation of several of the state’s laws. A long list of examples of forged signatures and faked state residencies colored the hearing.

But the problem goes well beyond petition fraud.

Citizen-initiated constitutional amendments cause more problems
“The core problem here is just how easy it is to amend the state constitution,” said Doug Friednash, one of the state’s top constitutional attorneys who has been hired to contest a series of laws made through the initiative process.

Statutory law — law mostly written by legislators to clarify or help carry out government responsibilities — can be changed, updated, strengthened or weakened through layered vetting processes, which include public debate and review by the state’s Legal Services attorneys. That’s the kind of law voters should be encouraged to propose, according to Court and Friednash.

By contrast, once citizens vote to amend the constitution, it’s much more difficult to address any subsequent problems.

“You don’t want to make constitutional changes without seriously vetting the proposals,” Friednash said. “If there are fundamental problems [with an amendment], we’re basically stuck with it. We can’t fix it.”

Friednash is presently representing anti-Amendment 54 plaintiffs challenging the so-called clean government amendment passed last November, which concerns campaign contributions and, according to supporters of the amendment, aims to combat pay-to-play political corruption. The action following the amendment’s passage is a sort of suspended animation, as the amendment goes into effect at the same time the suit to prevent it goes forward.

Ballot measures have become tools of special interests
Campaign finance-related corruption is exactly the kind of complicated topic best addressed through statutes not constitutional amendments, according to Jennie Drage Bowser, an elections expert with the National Conference of State Legislatures and a member of a special Initiative and Referendum task force put together by the NCSL in 2002.

“Legislators and initiative proponents really should work together. Proponents who have an idea should get in touch with lawmakers. Nine out of ten times [proponents don’t] ask lawmakers what they think or how they think it would be best to approach the issue.”

Bowser says legislators and legislative staff are in office basically to work on the often-complex issues that concern proponents and to introduce solid legislation on behalf of constituents.

“Lawmakers have all of these resources at their disposal,” she said. “They can lean on institutional memory, case law. They can get experts in the building to help write law based on what the proponent has in mind.”

Bowser says the explosion in popularity of the initiative process coincided with a political tension that rose up in the fractiously partisan 1990s, a tension that continues to this day. And that process has steered citizens away from lawmakers, who they see as gatekeepers who will thwart their plans.

“You saw that antagonism grow in the Clinton years. All of the sudden, you have mutual antipathy where you should have cooperation.”

You also have special interests, she said, organizations and movements that use the process to circumvent legislative scrutiny.

“Advocates of the initiative process will argue that the role of special interests is exaggerated. But that’s not what we found [on the NCSL task force]. On the left and the right, if you follow the money, you will see that a lot of the ideas originate outside the state.”

Anti-abortion and anti-gay initiative campaigns of the 1990s in Colorado, for example, were organized and bankrolled by the national Christian Coalition. Although there’s nothing illegal about that, it goes against the conception of direct democracy that wins the support of citizens.

“Initiatives are often not what you would typically consider the result of a ‘grassroots’ movement,” Bowser said. “It’s worth seriously considering whether that’s how you want laws and policies created in your state.”

The NCSL task force Bowser contributed to included advisers from many areas of expertise and across the political spectrum. In the end, it recommended against states adopting the initiative process. It concluded that the initiative was now often a tool of special interests; that the parties looking to make law through the process were often anonymous, their motives unclear, their proposals shielded against routine debate, deliberation and compromise; that there weren’t enough checks and balances built into the process; and that the laws made through the ballot box often hampered the ability to develop policy in a “comprehensive manner,” where proposed law didn’t end up contradicting or unnecessarily complicating existing law.

Let’s add in this one, just to hear the door slam: “Council of State Governments.”

These are the organizations sponsoring annual soirees where Colorado lawmakers have recently been off conventioneering. Both claim to be bipartisan, but they couldn’t be more different in approach and membership.  While ALEC is comprised of lawmakers, as well as special interest groups like tobacco and pharmaceutical and big oil, the NCSL’s membership is restricted to people who actually get elected to public office.

There’s more.On Monday, Colorado Confidential detailed the July 25-29 ALEC convention, to which at least 10 Republican representatives from Colorado traveled to Philadelphia.

It is unclear exactly how their trips were financed, and it is also unclear which Colorado state senators joined the delegation. State Sen. Ron May, who is the state chairman of ALEC, did not respond to numerous phone calls and e-mails seeking the names of those who went and other details – including how it was funded. In the past, Colorado lawmakers raised money from lobbyists representing special interest groups to pay for the travel.

The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) annual conference convened a week later in Boston. There, an estimated 1,800 state lawmakers, 2,000 staffers, and several thousand more individuals representing special interest and government groups gathered to talk policy, hear (separate) speeches by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and United States Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and, among other things, stage a mock Tea Party in Boston Harbor to protest unfunded federal mandates. (They didn’t actually throw tea into the harbor.)

According to spokeswomen from Colorado’s House and Senate Majority offices, unlike the ALEC conference, the state paid to offset costs to send lawmakers to Boston. This year’s Colorado delegation included the following lawmakers:

Representatives Debbie Benefield (D) Alice  Borodkin (D), Michael Garcia (D) Andy Kerr (D) Jeanne Labuda (D), Larry Liston (R), Tom Massey (R), Michael Merrifield (D), Ellen Roberts (R), Judy Solano (D), Debbie Stafford (R), Nancy Todd (D) and Glenn Vaad (R).

Colorado’s Senate delegation was comprised of all Democrats this year, and included; Peter Groff, Bob Bacon, Suzanne Williams, Ron Tupa, Bob Hagedorn, Gail Schwartz, Betty Boyd and John Morse. The attendees were required to get approval from leadership to go to the conference, and the state covered the lawmakers’ airfare, hotel, transportation and registration fees.

Katie Reinish, spokeswoman for the House Democrats, said that the state is subsidizing members to go to Boston via its travel budget – a final cost will not be available until after all reimbursement receipts have been submitted and approved.

The Democrats opted not to pay to send anyone to the ALEC conference, she said. As noted earlier, in years past travel costs are offset by special interest groups that help fund ALEC, including chemical, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies.

“The majority has not been cozy with these groups, and I don’t know that we’d go out of our way to attend a conference held by special interest groups,” Reinish said. “We pride ourselves on working for the public interest, not special interests.”

Sen. Ken Gordon, Colorado’s Senate Majority Leader, said that there was some discussion about convention travel in general this year – including questions over whether it would be appropriate for ALEC’s corporate contributors to pay the airplane fare for some lawmakers to travel to Philadelphia.

“We even had this problem with NCSL meetings,” Gordon said. “There’s a lot of ancillary events that are sponsored by private businesses, and my advice was, `don’t go to those events.’ He further advised his colleagues, he said, to not accept free dinners from private companies while they were in Boston, but instead pay for their own dinners.

In a separate Monday story, Colorado Confidential detailed ALEC – a virtual who’s who of corporate America. All told, an estimated $5 million a year is pumped by special interests into the organization, which brings them together with mostly-conservative lawmakers to craft “model legislation” to take back to their home states. The organization is responsible for bringing uniform laws that affect millions of citizens throughout the United States – on issues ranging from private prisons to school vouchers to environmental and public health issues.

This week, Bill Wyatt, director of media relations for the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), described the differences between ALEC and his organization.

ALEC, Wyatt notes, is an individual member organization – which means that lobbyists and corporations and special interest groups can buy their way to the table. By contrast NCSL membership is restricted to lawmakers and legislative staff of all 50 states. When you get elected, you are automatically a member.

“[With ALEC], anybody who has the money to pony up can sit side-by-side with legislators and vote on policy and model legislation,” Wyatt said. “That doesn’t work at NCSL. Our legislators decide on legislative policy.”

That’s not to say that people representing special interest groups don’t show up to the conferences – they just don’t have the ability to join as members – or in on votes taken on issues within the organization, he said.

The NCSL conferences also don’t employ a “model legislation” strategy like that of ALEC’s. Rather, Wyatt said, lawmakers from both parties gather to talk about pressing state issues, which this year included health care reform, the REAL ID Act, redistricting, children’s health insurance and divestment from Iran, North Korea and the Sudan.

Yet a third organization of state lawmakers also meets annually to talk about policy issues. Like the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Council for State Governments (CSG) is not funded by special interest dollars.

Several Colorado lawmakers have so far been cleared to attend this year’s regional CSG meeting Sept. 16-19 in Jackson, Wyoming. They include: Reps. Bob Gardner (R), Dan Gibbs (D), Mary Hodge (D) and Dianne Primavera (D).

Click here to read more about this year’s trip by Colorado lawmakers to the ALEC convention — in a post-Amendment 41 era.
Click here to read more about ALEC and how it works.

Cara DeGette is a senior fellow at Colorado Confidential, and a columnist and contributing editor at the Colorado Springs Independent. E-mail her at cdegette@coloradoconfidential.com