Fix-it-First Myths and Facts
Myth #4

Myth #4: Wisconsin Department of Transportation budgeting procedures provide a clear and accessible distinction between maintenance, repair, and expansion work.

Fact #4: State highway work falls along a spectrum in terms of cost and intensiveness of work.  This spectrum is broken into three segments, from least expensive and intensive to most expensive and intensive: Maintenance, Rehabilitation and Major Highway Projects. 

Most of the Maintenance funds are used for snowplowing, signage, lighting and other daily work.  Statutorily, the Major Highway Projects program only includes projects costing more than $5 million and involving any of the following: adding 2.5 or more miles of new highway, relocating 2.5 or more miles of highway, adding one or more lanes of at least 5 miles, and improving at least 10 miles of divided highway to freeway standards.  Rehabilitation, commonly referred to as the three R’s – Resurfacing, Reconditioning and Reconstruction – covers the work in between.  Given these scopes of work, a considerable amount of capacity expansion work is possible in the Rehabilitation program without triggering both the cost factor and one of the mileage factors.

1000 Friends of Wisconsin analyzed the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s Six Year Highway Plan 2002-2007 to see how much capacity expansion work is categorized as Rehabilitation.  The analysis produced the following results:

 

  • Roughly $248 million of $3.95 billion in work outlined in the plan consists of projects that WisDOT categorizes as Rehabilitation with expansion. 

  • Another $619 million of the Rehabilitation work in the Six Year Highway Plan consists of projects that include expansion or widening, but WisDOT does not specifically categorize them as such. 

  • In total, more than $850 million in expansion and widening work is added through the Rehabilitation program, which is commonly portrayed and understood as repair work. 

  • (To learn more about this analysis, please contact 1000 Friends for the State Highway Program Analysis report from fall 2003.)

 

Only two possibilities exist regarding this data.  First, a considerable amount of expansion work is in fact included in the Rehabilitation program, and thus there is not a clear and accessible distinction between expansion work and maintenance and repair work.  Second, a considerable amount of expansion work is not included in the Rehabilitation program, but WisDOT’s reporting mechanisms are inaccurate or misleading.  Either way, WisDOT’s budgeting procedures do not allow the public to clearly and easily understand how its money is being spent.

Combining the $867 million in expansion work contained in the Rehabilitation program with the $851 million in Major Highway Projects in the Six Year Highway Plan means that WisDOT will spend $1.72 billion of $3.95 billion on expansion work.  This $1.72 billion amounts to more than 40 cents of every dollar in the Six Year Highway Plan being spent on expansion work.

1000 Friends of Wisconsin
16 N. Carroll Street, Suite 810   Madison WI 53703    608.259.1000