LANSING – While backers of more funding for the state’s roads sort out what went wrong this week when the Senate proved incapable of passing a major increase in funding for roads, Denise Donohue, director of the County Road Association of Michigan, said proponents may have to look for ways to get the public more engaged on the issue.

Advocates of more funding have tried many mechanisms, but given the lack of votes, supporters will have to think about new ways to get their message out, Donohue said.

“Having road agencies in all 83 counties, we have to make sure we’re getting the word out,” she said. “I personally thought the word was out.”

Still, it will take a bit of time to analyze what happened in the Senate.

On Thursday, Ms. Donohue was at the Capitol as efforts to raise any meaningful revenue through HB 5477 fell apart. Ms. Donohue said she kept getting questions and concerns from senators about how their constituents would react to a tax increase.

“It’s time to regroup,” she said. “At the County Road Association, we are very disappointed. There is no question that the 83 counties do not think we can save our way out of this problem.”

Wednesday, Donohue was in Escanaba meeting with CRAM members, but the mood was circumspect.

“Members were literally hanging on every word and yet (there was) a sense of we’ve been this close before, we’re not going to get our hopes up,” she said.

Polls show roads are the top issue for the public and those polls show the public is willing to pay for it, Donohue said.

Yet the political realities are clear.

“We certainly understand it’s a difficult vote,” she said. “It runs counter to traditional campaign thoughts in terms of needing to do a tax increase. On the other hand, the public is loud and clear.”

Donohue said the statistics are clear – only 19 percent of roads that receive federal funding are in good condition and that number is even worse for roads that do not qualify for federal aid.

Legislators should also understand that road workers are filling the potholes, but it is inevitable that those short-term patches will fail relatively quickly unlike more comprehensive fixes, she said.

“Roads are not living creatures that are going to heal themselves. They’ve suffered a great deal of damage from this winter and an epic pothole season,” she said. “The problem’s only going to get worse until we get a solution.”

Of the situation in the Senate, which voted down various funding mechanisms multiple times, Donohue said she could not opine on why the Senate kept putting measures up for votes only to see them fall short of passage.

“It just seemed like it was a very fluid situation. It’s a complex issue,” she said. “There’s a lot of moving parts. There were a lot of bills in the package. From the County Road Association’s perspective, we could live with all of the other bills that are in that package. Then when it just came time to really put the funding on the line, we just kind of balked and stalled and lost some momentum there.”

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