SAN ANTONIO — When state departments of transportation such as TXDoT access federal dollars for major road projects, the funding comes from the Highway Trust Fund, which is underwritten with federal gas tax monies. Every time you fill your tank, 18.4 cents on every gallon goes to Washington. Unfortunately, those 18 cents aren’t going as far as they used to.

The current gas tax has been in place since the early days of the Clinton administration. The cars we drive today are much more fuel efficient than they were more than 20 years ago. Our commutes might have gotten longer, but we’re not heading to the gas station as much. And since the gas tax wasn’t pegged to inflation, its buying power has diminished. As a result, the Highway Trust Fund is running on fumes, putting in jeopardy road construction projects all over the country and the jobs that go with them.

This funding crunch is especially concerning in border states such as Texas, where the efficient movement of freight in and out of our border crossings with Mexico is critical to our state’s economic health.

Maintaining Texas’ position as the country’s top exporter is made possible not only by the state’s business-friendly policies, but also by infrastructure that encourages a multimodal approach to freight mobility. Bottlenecks at our ports are expensive. At some point, everything we buy or sell, from food to furniture, will be on a truck, train or cargo ship. If goods can’t get to market quickly, costs to businesses go up and get passed on to consumers.

Before Congress departed Washington for its annual August recess, it passed a temporary funding patch for the trust fund, which was on schedule to go belly-up before Sept. 1 when the next fiscal year starts. The temporary fix apparently is the best this divided Congress can muster, but punting the issue to next year doesn’t make the larger challenge go away.

Various ideas are floating around Capitol Hill to fund the country’s transportation programs, ranging from a hike in the gas tax to a diversion of the savings that would result from the end of Saturday mail delivery. Most policy proposals have been met with a tepid response, with election year politics complicating things even more.

But for those of us who are concerned about the fate of transportation infrastructure in Texas and the country, we just want Congress and the president to act. Washington needs to pivot quickly to a substantive debate over how transportation infrastructure should be funded in this country over the long term. Unlike our current transportation framework, the next highway bill should last at least five years, should reflect the unique trade needs of border states and should take a multimodal approach to moving freight.

Congress will be in session fewer than 50 days before the end of the calendar year and 2015 will be here before we know it, which makes the need for real leadership on transportation funding even more urgent.

Jesse Hereford is the director of government relations and business development for S&B Infrastructure in San Antonio and the chairman of the Border Trade Alliance.

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