Warning: Rant ahead...

Okay, I've gotta vent about something.

1st off, let me be clear, I support education very much. I've spent 21 of my 35 years in school of some sort. Yes, 60% of my life in a school, I like education.

2nd off, I do have a bit of an interest in what I am about to rant about, paycheck-wise at my current place of employment.

Those are so you can see that there are other motivating factors outside of my rant.

Here goes:

Wisconsin has a gas tax. Everybody pays an extra $0.26 per gallon. Yes, this hurts when the gas prices go up. But if you think about it really hard, the percentage of taxes paid on each gallon actually drops for every penny the price of gasoline goes up.

Where does that money go, you might ask? Well, it is earmarked for transportation projects. Yep, the gas tax here in Wisconsin is a good old-fashioned "user" tax. You drive on the roads with a gas hogging truck like I do, you pay for it. You drive a little car, you pay for the roads. I think it's fair, almost like a toll-way, you just only have to stop every 400 miles (or so) instead of every 10 ft.

Well, that's where the money is SUPPOSED to go. But then you get a short-sighted governor in office trying to be a "hero". First, he gets the state senate and assembly to rescind the legal 3% annual increase in the gas tax (no huge deal, but it's short sighted, and he's not saving us anything). Second, he takes $420 million of the annual transportation budget and hands it to his buddies in education (the education lobbyists basically got him elected).

Now, I want you to think about something here. How do roads get built? What about maintained? Well, they don't just magically get fixed, let me tell you. There are men and women working their behinds off trying to keep up with demand. There are also lots of machines working too. Guess what they run on? Diesel fuel, most of them. Okay, can anyone guess what might be happening to bids from contractors this year? Through the effing roof, all the way through the effing roof.

What is hot mix asphalt made of? You guessed it, asphaltic concrete cement and stone. Asphaltic concrete cement is a fancy word for "oil". Can anybody guess what has happened to the price of hot mix asphalt this summer? I just talked with one of our clients on Wednesday. 137% increase in asphalt costs this summer. From $218 per ton (approximate) last year to $516 per ton (approximate) this year. 2.5 miles of two lane county road (which requires about 4" thick of asphalt, more major roads take much more asphalt) take approximately 9000 tons of HMA to build. You do the math.

Can anyone say "oh, shoot"?

So, in summary, the WisDOT has less money to pay for more expensive stuff going on. From water-cooler talk over at the region I work with a lot, they are approximately 2 years behind in budget at this point, and it's only getting worse (borrowing from 2009 budget soon to pay for this year's projects). The extra $420 million would have been a big help to get through some of the rough patches. If we aren't careful, WisDOT might want to declare bankruptcy.

Sorry, Democrats out there, but Doyle has got to go. I understand that education is important as much as the next guy, but so is our freaking infrastructure. And if we keep losing sight of the infrastructure, we are in some seriously deep doo-doo. How much is a school worth if you can't even get to it?