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Adequate funding need for transportation

To the Editor:
We are the lucky ones — we get to experience all the seasons.
Spring shows us all the beauty of nature with the sprouting of the leaves on the trees, the grass turning green, perennials spring from the ground to bloom again and rain washes everything clean.
Summer, we can experience heat waves with the best of them, enjoy the lakes and parks, watch the crops grow and enjoy every minute of sun and outdoors.
Fall gives us the colors of the leaves turning, the harvest that supports our needs and the return to the business of learning and work.
This brings us to the winter — the periods of below-zero temps, the sanding of the roadways, the snow plows, and just staying warm. There are winter sports for the hardy souls that inhabit our part of the world.
All these seasons are wonderful for what they provide us, but if you happen to be in the transportation business (roads), all these seasons provide challenges that take their toll on the roadways. The ground freezes and thaws, chemicals are used to prevent accidents due to ice and snow, plows do damage to the surfaces of the roads, age and deterioration take their toll on bridges and freeways.
We saw this in the most dramatic way right here when the bridge collapsed during the rush hour in Minneapolis.
The message is that we have a lot to repair and replace and improvements to our road system, all 283,828 lane miles of it.
Logic would tell us this is an ongoing issue that needs to be realistically approached in our state budget. There needs to be a system that continues to have constant flow of money to keep up with the transportation system that affects every one of us, whether you drive or not. Somebody drives those who do not drive themselves.
About this time, a lot of the voters in McLeod County’s eyes glaze over, logic goes out the window, the robotic arm of our representatives pushes the little button that says “no,” and there is scrambling to get money from other parts of the budget that are every bit as necessary. Taxes for transportation not only produce business for those in road construction, jobs for workers, improvement in our ability to move products to where they are needed, and, yes, provide an important part of our state wide economy.
Taxes allow us to do together the things that individuals could not do. Privatization would not do it because their bottom line would look bad to their investors, and one knows that is the holy grail of a lot of businesses.
Let the reasonable people in the legislature do what is best for our transportation system — provide the extra tax money to keep us and our economy moving.
Jan Conner
Hutchinson