Voters overwhelmingly said “no” to tax increases in 2015, when a ballot proposal to raise the state sales and gas taxes to raise more money for roads was shot down by more than 80% of voters opposed.

Later that year, lawmakers wised up and instead passed a plan to dedicate an addition billion dollars per year to fixing our roads, phased in over the 2015 – 2019 period.

That, and another hundred million dollars thrown in last year, is why our roads are now covered in construction. In just the past five years, road funding soared from $3 billion per year to four. That’s a huge increase, and while it’s great that we are finally catching up on fixing our roads, motorists are now finding problems with the opposite extreme: all the closures, detours, and traffic jams have a substantial economic impact in lost time.

Nevertheless, the prevailing attitude in Lansing is that something must be done to find even more new money for road work. But any new revenue means more money taken from taxpayers, one way or another. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has proposed raising the tax on gasoline by an additional 45 cents per gallon, which would leave Michigan with by far the highest gas taxes in the country, on top of motorists paying by far the highest auto insurance rates in the country. But most of the alternatives are no better. If raising revenue is the objective, there’s really no way other than to raise taxes, although some approaches have more smoke and mirrors than others.

At the end of the day, the state government can’t create money from nowhere, so we have three basic options: We can raise revenue by taking more money in one way or another, we can cut spending elsewhere to divert money to the roads, or we can provide record funding to roads without doing either.

The House Republican plan would fund roads with an additional $500 million next year, on top of all of the new spending increases. Isn’t that enough?

One thing we could do at no cost is to hold MDOT and other transportation bureaucrats accountable for these billions being spent unwisely. One major reason we’re in this mess is that once repaired with cheap materials, roads often fall apart again before long. This is convenient for the road industry, which profits from higher ongoing maintenance costs.

If taxpayers want to see road repairs done at lower cost rather than higher costs, they should contact their lawmakers – House, Senate, and Governor – and urge this record-level funding be used wisely.

We face a state government shutdown if the House, Senate, and Governor don’t reach a budget deal by September. That possibility must be off the table. If there aren’t the votes to support tax hikes, we must reach a deal that fixes our roads with the money we have. This is the normal democratic process.

Let’s hope nobody in our state government would jeopardize the continuity of essential government services over an inherently politicized budget process. We need to reach a deal, and soon.