Let's take care of the roads we have

Matt Garrett isn't promising to fill every pothole in Eastern Oregon, but he's onto something just the same.

Garrett runs one of the state's biggest outfits: the Department of Transportation.

He visited Baker City last week to talk about his suggestion that ODOT divert dollars away from building new roads we don't need and into fixing the roads we already have — and that are punishing our shock absorbers.

Garrett's idea makes sense.

Drivers in Baker County and elsewhere in Eastern Oregon aren't wasting time and precious fuel idling in traffic jams caused by a lack of lanes.

But our roads — and our backs — take quite a beating every year from our combination of searing summers and sub-zero winters.

Garrett's basic premise is that each of ODOT's five regions — Region 5 covers most of Eastern Oregon — should have more flexibility in how they spend money.

Specifically, Garrett contends that state law should not mandate, as it does now, that every region spend a certain percentage of its budget on "modernization" — which usually means building something new.

"Maintenance and preservation often falls by the wayside, because the sizzle is with modernization," Garrett said. "In a surgical sense we need to tailor our programs to make sure preservation needs and maintenance needs are met."

Garrett's right.

The bigger problem, though, is one that's beyond Garrett's control — or the state Legislature's.

Oregon's major state source of road money is its 24-cents-per-gallon gas tax. That tax hasn't increased since 1993.

Boosting that tax now probably would hurt ODOT rather than help, though, because increasing gas prices would force people to buy less gas. That, of course, is a trend that our current $4 per gallon prices have jumpstarted.

Nonetheless, Garrett has at least broached a topic that ODOT, and the citizens it serves, needs to talk about.

Oregon needs to spend its road dollars as efficiently as possible.

And what we need in Eastern Oregon are good roads, not new ones.