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When Henry Manning opened his dental practice on Perkins Road between Bluebonnet Boulevard and Siegen Lane in the late 1980s, he could get to the office from his Highland Road neighborhood in less than 10 minutes.

These days it might take three times that long and, maddeningly, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

“It’s horrible, just horrible,” says Manning, who has lived in Baton Rouge since the 1960s. “And you never know what time of day is going to be the worst. It was bad before Katrina, and it’s really bad now.”

Sound familiar? If you live in Baton Rouge, you can likely tell a similar story. When the Baton Rouge Area Chamber conducted its annual survey of business owners earlier this year, traffic congestion ranked as the second-biggest obstacle to economic development in the area, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has negotiated Florida Boulevard or Airline Highway at rush hour.

Indeed, traffic congestion is a nightmare in Baton Rouge, and the crumbling roads and highways lack the capacity to handle the volume of vehicles that traverse them every day. It’s a statewide problem caused primarily by an outdated tax that doesn’t generate enough money to tackle an ever-growing backlog of construction projects. But it’s even worse in this area because of factors unique to the Capital City. Among them:

-- The city developed with little thought to master planning and is consequently criss-crossed with streets that don’t connect and subdivisions that sit in isolation.

-- The local legislative delegation has historically failed to unite around an agenda that could result in projects benefiting the metro area.

-- The EPA restricts how much new capacity the area can add to the network to try to ease congestion build because Baton Rouge exceeds the acceptable limits for ozone emission.

-- The population has mushroomed since Katrina, taxing an infrastructure that was already woefully inadequate.

Above and beyond all this is another factor—an inefficient system at the state level that for a myriad of reasons delays projects year after year while the problems worsen and construction costs increase. Consider that when Manning built his office building in 1987, his contractor told him he’d have to move the new sign he’d just planted in a cement base.

“He told me it was in the right of way and that they were planning to widen Perkins Road to four lanes,” says Manning, who decided to take his chances and leave the sign standing.

He’s glad he didn’t listen. It took 20 years for construction on Perkins to actually begin, and the sign didn’t have to come down until a few months ago.

Manning is good-natured about it, smiling with bemusement as he recounts the story, but he asks the question that gets to the heart of the problem: Why should such a project take so long?

Does the state play politics with Baton Rouge projects, as some local planners like to quietly speculate around the halls of the Capitol? Or is the system is so underfunded and heavily bureaucratized that things don’t get done in a timely fashion? And above all, what can be done to make things better?

The problem

To understand why transportation funding is such a mess, you have to go back more than 20 years. Even in those blow-and-go boom years of $60-a-barrel crude, Louisiana’s transportation infrastructure was woefully inadequate, and DOTD had a backlog of construction projects that was somewhere between $3 million and $4 million.

In an attempt to address the problem, the Legislature passed a 16-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax in 1984 and subsequently created a Transportation Trust Fund, out of which the money for highway projects would come. The tax helped for a while but was never adjusted to account for inflation, and the buying power of the $400 million or so it generates annually has been cut in half over the past 20 years.

Construction costs, meanwhile, have skyrocketed, increasing by $2 billion in the past two years alone. Part of the inflation is because of materials shortages overseas, according to DOTD; part of it was created by the hurricanes in 2005. Whatever the cause, the effect added significantly to the huge backlog of unmet construction needs, which now stands at some $14 billion.

The most recent federal highway legislation initially held some promise for Louisiana. Alas, Congress earmarked most of the money for specific highway projects. While some of those projects were badly needed—Interstate 49 in North Louisiana, for instance—it left DOTD with precious little in discretionary funds.

“We have enough to take care of 4% of the needs in this state,” says Mike Schiro, a deputy assistant secretary for planning at DOTD. “We can only do four out of every 100 projects.”

And it’s actually worse than that. Most of those funds have to go to general upkeep and maintenance on highways that are already in bad shape. Only a small portion of the funds is available for the so-called capacity projects that widen roads and ease traffic congestion. Currently, DOTD has about $75 million to spend on $8 billion worth of badly needed capacity projects.

“We have enough to deal with 1% of the congested roads in the state,” Schiro says.

If that is the big picture of why things are so bad statewide, there are special circumstances unique to Baton Rouge that make traffic and road-related issues in the city arguably worse than elsewhere.

For starters, the city was developed without the benefit of a master transportation plan. As a result, it lacks a cohesive grid pattern, and neighborhoods have developed relatively independent of one another in a textbook pattern of urban sprawl.

“The way cities like Baton Rouge grew don’t show connectivity,” says Huey Dugas, chief planner for the local Metropolitan Planning Organization, a quasi-state agency that helps determine where federal transportation dollars should be spent. “Nobody’s in charge of how developments are designed and built in relation to each other.”

The city has also come late to such innovations as Intelligent Traffic Systems. Though it is finally installing cameras, sensors and sophisticated signal lights that automatically detect traffic flow patterns at certain major intersections, the area doesn’t have nearly as many ITS devices as it needs to ease the ubiquitous bottlenecks.

“You need a master plan, you need to stick with a master plan, and you need to have ITS,” says Don Powers, who studied the issue extensively as the Chamber’s transportation guru in the mid-1990s.

Another factor unique to Baton Rouge is its often-fractured legislative delegation, which hasn’t always teamed up to advance the area’s interests. Regional planners and local politicos still smart over what happened with the TIMED program, a special 4-cent gasoline tax that voters approved in 1987 to fund a limited number of rural road improvement projects.

New Orleans managed to wrangle three high-dollar projects for its decidedly un-rural metropolitan area thanks to some deft political maneuvering, while the Baton Rouge area didn’t get a dime.

“New Orleans got a lot of it because of its delegation,” Dugas says. “It was very political.”

As if all that isn’t bad enough, Baton Rouge is limited in what it can do to try to ease congestion—not that that state has the funds for it anyway—because of a federal EPA ruling several years ago declaring this an ozone-non-attainment area. As a practical matter, this means the area is restricted in how much capacity it can add to the network of roads highways, the thinking being that wider highways will allow for more cars that will further diminish the region’s air quality.

Then, of course, there’s the city’s rapid post-Katrina population surge. Whether it’s 50,000 as the city-parish claims or 20,000 as the state maintains, a lot more drivers are here now than just a couple of years ago.

Figures from DOTD show the Baton Rouge area has the second-highest count of vehicle miles traveled, or VMTs, of any area in the state after New Orleans. In other words, motorists are collectively driving some 15.6 million miles a day over local roads and streets.

Dollars and sense

Some experts and local planners quietly suggest there’s a potentially more troubling reason that roads and traffic are such a problem in Baton Rouge. It has to do with whether the area actually receives all the federal and state transportation dollars it’s supposed to have. Tracking federal dollars that come here is next to impossible, and DOTD does little to illuminate the process.

Each metropolitan area has a federally mandated local planning organization, or MPO, that coordinates with the state and federal government to determine where transportation dollars should be spent in its area. Each MPO gets a certain portion of available state and federal transportation funds every year based on a formula that takes into account the area’s population, VMT count and need. The MPO then comes up with a list of projects and its estimated costs in what is known as a Traffic Improvement Program, or TIP.

The TIP is not a firm budget, and the cost figures it contains are estimates, not carved in stone. Still, the state actually gets the overall amount promised to the MPO in the TIP and the funds are supposed to go to the projects specifically delineated in the document. Because the program is “financially constrained,” its total amount is finite and must be spent within the given fiscal year.

Questions arise, however, because DOTD doesn’t end up spending the money the way that is specified in the TIP. Baton Rouge may get $100 million for 15 construction projects, but at the end of the year only 10 of the projects have been let. The rest get delayed. So where did the money go?

According to DOTD, it goes to other projects. The department is the first to admit that it can’t get everything done in a given year because projects routinely cost more than originally estimated. Those ready to be let at the beginning of the fiscal year are funded first and often end up using the funds that were originally designated for some other project, which will cost more when it eventually gets bid in the following year—or the year after that.

A case in point is the project currently under way to widen Joor Road. Originally estimated in 2004 at a cost of nearly $18 million, the contract was supposed to be let in 2005. But when it was time to go to bid, it had to be delayed because DOTD had run out of money.

Among the many projects that contributed to the shortfall that year was another local project, La. 19, the main highway through Baker. It got funded ahead of Joor Road because it had been delayed from the previous year. Delaying the La. 19 work, however, increased its cost from an estimated $3 million in 2004 to $7.2 million.

“Often, projects that get pushed from one year to the next are the result of the other projects costing more than we had anticipated and the money runs out, so we have no choice but to delay,” says Eric Kalivoda, assistant secretary at DOTD. “It’s not that we shift it to another part of the state.”

But Louisianans have to take his word for it because there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for tracking exactly how and where the dollars get shifted around. Those decisions are left to an administrative steering committee made up of the department heads at DOTD. They meet monthly and constantly revise and update the list of projects from the various TIPS, making adjustments, they say, based purely on financial and technical considerations.

“It’s not political,” says Schiro, who sits on the steering committee. “People call in with their request and opinions, and we take it into consideration, but it’s based on how much money we have and where the various projects are at a given time.”

DOTD says it doesn’t swap out one project for another. Rather, the committee looks at the all the projects compared to all the available funds and makes do with what it has. Typically, there is never enough to go around. But if the problem is this simple, why doesn’t DOTD get more realistic with its cost estimates?

Again, the answers are murky. DOTD says it already factors an additional 10% into its cost estimates to try to account for price increases and other contingencies. Beyond that, however, the department maintains that by low-balling the estimate of its projects, it helps keep costs down.

“You don’t want to start estimating real high by letting contractors think they can make a little money off the state,” DOTD communications director Mark Lambert says. “It’s one of the ways we contain costs.”

While that makes sense on paper, it doesn’t always work out in reality. Consider the Perkins Road project that Manning first heard about in 1987. DOTD says the project was put off numerous times because the area’s MPO had other priorities. It is, they say, a classic but unfortunate example of what happens when there’s a significant backlog of construction projects.

“When we talk about a $14 billion backlog, people’s eyes start glazing over,” Lambert says. “But at the same time, they want to know why it takes so long to get things done. It’s because we have a $14 billion backlog. Those are very real projects.”

But 20 years is a long time to wait for one of the major improvement projects in the area. DOTD agrees, but points out that the Baton Rouge area has proportionally received its fair share of all transportation dollars in the state the past two decades. Since 1990, 13% of all transportation construction contracts in the state have been let in the Baton Rouge area, second only to the New Orleans-Houma area, where 16% of the projects were done.

In recent years, the Baton Rouge area has been getting an increasingly bigger share of the pie, too. According to figures from the MPO, transportation funding for priority projects in the area has increased threefold in the past decade, jumping from $20 million in 1996 to $60 million last year. Indeed, state officials are adamant that Baton Rouge is getting its proportional share; it’s just that the pie is too small.

“It’s true the people in Baton Rouge aren’t getting their fair share, but neither are the people in New Orleans or Shreveport or Alexandria,” Lambert says. “No one in this state is getting what they truly deserve.”

‘Crisis situation’

That’s no longer a good enough excuse for an increasingly vocal group of business leaders and local legislators. BRAC has united with other chambers in the region to promote legislation that would shift more state dollars to transportation projects. A business and construction industry group, the Louisiana Good Roads and Transportation Association, has also launched a statewide campaign, Driving Louisiana Forward, to try to raise public awareness about the situation.

“We are way into crisis situation,” says Jennifer Marusak, spokesperson for the Driving Louisiana Forward campaign. “Instead of doing what we often do in Louisiana, which is to spread whatever we have as thin as possible, we need to make a strategic investment in our infrastructure.”

So far, several bills have been filed to address the situation, both immediately and in the long term. The short-term solution, backed by the governor, would dedicate roughly $450 million of the current $1.3 billion budget surplus to transportation funding. It enjoys broad support and will likely pass in one form or another.

A more ambitious proposal advanced by the chairmen of both the House and Senate transportation committees, would shift $621 million a year out of the state’s general fund and into the state’s transportation trust fund, which pays for highway projects. Nearly one-third of the money would come from the sales taxes on vehicles and vehicle parts.

Local chambers and Driving Louisiana Forward also favor this approach, though supporters acknowledge chances of passage are iffy because shifting funds to highways will mean taking them away from somewhere else. Still, supporters argue that given the huge budget surplus this year the state can afford to shift funds around.

“There will always be competing priorities,” BRAC executive vice chairman Steve Grissom says. “But when you have an additional $1.3 billion beyond what was budgeted last year, there’s room for new priorities.”

Still other bills would shift certain obligations from the transportation trust fund to the general fund. Some $85 million in health and retirement benefits for DOTD employee, for instance, are paid from the fund that’s supposed to fund highway construction. Another $40 million annually pays for State Police traffic control.

“Is that central to the missions of the Transportation Trust Fund?” Marusak asks. “We think those kinds of obligations should come out of the general fund.”

DOTD officials favor anything that would get them more money. While the long-term solution would obviously go a lot further, even $621 million a year would only go so far to clear the construction backlog. That would take more like $1.3 billion a year over and above what the department already gets—not accounting for inflation.

“It’s too much money, and people are not going to be willing to pay for that,” Kalivoda says. “But you can stop it from getting bigger and start chipping away at it and keep it from growing.”

But that will take time, and municipal governments are getting sick of waiting. That’s why they’re building their own roads and exploring public-private partnerships, such as toll roads. The proposed Baton Rouge loop, which would connect a ring of state highways around the metro area enabling motorists to bypass I-10, is one such example. It would be funded partially by tolls and partially by the municipal government. Long discussed, the plan inched closer to reality last month when the Metro Council approved $2 million to hire a consultant.

“We don’t have the luxury of waiting on the state or Congress to address our needs,” Mayor Kip Holden says. “We’re taking the initiative ourselves.”

Still, a loop has been in the discussion phase for several years and is several years away at best. Even if lawmakers pass the most ambitious of the transportation funding bills, it won’t do the trick. Planners continue to question the way funds are spent at the state level and no one seems optimistic that things will get better anytime in the foreseeable future.

“There’s just not enough money, and no one’s getting what they need,” Lambert says. “Everyone’s frustrated.”