May 21, 2025

By Lane Kimble

How do you fix a looming $1 billion transportation budget shortfall?

Raise the gas tax?  Charge fees based on how many miles you drive?  Build tolls?  Tap further into the general fund?

WTBA Executive Director Steve Baas could be happy with any of those.

“Our favorite kind of new revenue is the ones that can get passed.  We’re a little bit agnostic,” Baas said during Tuesday’s WisPolitics luncheon discussion on transportation funding.

“This is going to take tough decisions and the Legislature is capable of making tough long term decisions.  They’ve done it over and over again.  They don’t necessarily like it and sometimes they do it only when all the other alternatives are gone, but they’re capable of doing that.

Baas joined State Sen. Cory Tomczyk, State Rep. Kalan Haywood, and Wisconsin Policy Forum President Jason Stein on the luncheon panel at the Madison Club.

“Transportation is the base of everything,” Sen. Tomczyk acknowledged.  “We have no tourism if we don’t have good transportation.  We have no manufacturing if we don’t have good transportation.  We have no agriculture if we don’t have good transportation.  People want to be able to just get around and go.”

Moderator Jeff Mayers guided the conversation through questions on the Policy Forum’s December report that demonstrated how ending gas tax indexing in 2006 grew the transportation fund deficit.

That decision, which Stein covered at the time as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel before joining the Wisconsin Policy Forum, cost the state more than $3 billion in potential revenue over the years.

“It had a very big effect,” Stein said.

WATCH: Spectrum News 1 follows up on the conversation with Baas, Stein

Topics also revolved around the current budget surplus, major and mega projects, priorities in urban versus rural parts of the state, new USDOT Secretary Sean Duffy and more.

Baas said state lawmakers should consider all options on the table when it comes to providing sustainable revenue, but the most realistic and immediate path forward is likely tied to gas.

“The transportation fund was designed for that.  It was designed, also, coming up on a century ago,” Baas said.  “Everybody wants to talk about running government like a business.  Tell me how long your business would survive if you froze your primary source of revenue while every single cost input in your business was going up?  That’s what Wisconsin has done the last 20 years.”