Blueprint America — with The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer — in a story on how America’s highways are built and funded — often times at the expense of mass-transit development. Correspondent Rick Karr reports from Birmingham, Alabama.

What’s a Zombie Highway?
Rick Karr, Blueprint America correspondent

Let me answer that question with a hypothetical: Let’s pretend that the federal government has a program to help you improve your house or apartment. Lawmakers in Washington promise that for every dollar that you put up for construction, they’ll give you four dollars. It doesn’t matter how expensive the project turns out to be –- you’ll get four bucks in subsidies for every dollar that comes out of your own pocket. Until the project is finished.

In that case, would you ever have an incentive to finish your home improvement project? Or would the project keep shambling forward, like an extra in a George Romero film?

In the most recent Blueprint America piece for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, we report on a highway program that reform advocates say works exactly like the home improvement scenario.

The Appalachian Development Highway System was authorized by President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s. The idea was to help nine Appalachian states build about 2,300 miles of highways to improve economic conditions in some of the poorest parts of the country. The federal government agreed to put up four dollars for every dollar the states would spend.

Forty-five years later, the program has expanded to 13 states, and more than 3,000 miles –- and counting. As environmental lawyer and highway-funding reform advocate David Burwell told us, under the system –- known as “cost-to-complete” –- states have an incentive to add more and more highways to the program, build them as expensively as possible –- and never finish them, because doing so would “turn off that federal spigot of money.”

Our case study is one of the newest additions to the Appalachian system: Birmingham, Alabama’s proposed Northern Beltline, a 52-mile stretch of interstate that would wind through the hills north of the city. The cost to taxpayers would be at least $3.327 billion dollars. The State of Alabama would put up its share of $665 million, while taxpayers from the other 49 states and the District of Columbia would cover the lion’s share of the remaining $2.662 billion.

Advocates for the highway say Birmingham needs it to boost economic development. They point to the growth that sprung up along the city’s southern beltline. They also argue that the new road would speed traffic through the region.

Opponents look at the growth along the southern beltline with horror, and argue that it’s exactly the opposite of what Birmingham needs. “We have built enough Interstates to kill our inner cities,” says Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford. “We don’t need more interstates. We’re going to need high speed public transportation. But we’re always spending our money in the wrong places.”

It’s kind of our turn, so to speak.

That’s what Phillip Wiedmeyer, a leading advocate for Birmingham’s Northern Beltline, said when I asked him why taxpayers in California or Illinois should pay for the 52-mile road through the hills north of the Alabama city. (Roughly 80 percent of the road’s cost –- or about $2.5 billion –- will be covered by taxpayers who don’t live in Alabama.) The explanation behind Wiedmeyer’s claim is complicated. According to several highway funding experts Blueprint America interviewed, it’s also inaccurate.

Wiedmeyer is head of the Coalition for Regional Transportation (CRT), a group formed last year by the Birmingham Business Alliance (formally known as the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce) to advocate for “fast-track” construction of the city’s Northern Beltline. Wiedmeyer is also a former vice president of Alabama Power. He now runs an Alabama energy research center, but his official email address remains at The Southern Company, a parent of Alabama Power. CRT is one of two groups pushing explicitly for the road; the other is the Business Alliance for Responsible Development (BARD), a coalition mostly made up of large landowners, real-estate developers, and construction firms who vehemently oppose Birmingham-area environmental groups. We initially approached BARD for a pro-Beltline interview; BARD set up our interview with Wiedmeyer instead.

Let’s look at an exchange Wiedmeyer and I had early in our interview. Note that the clip is unedited, except to cut from his camera to mine:

Wiedmeyer makes a number of questionable claims in that clip.

Starting near the top, when he says:

There’s a formula that the Appalachian Regional Commission uses for developing the highways that they designated and so under the formula we get our share of it.

Wiedmeyer implies that the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) “designated” the Northern Beltline project –- in other words, that bureaucrats or experts in Washington vetted the idea of building a 52-mile loop of highway through the countryside north of Birmingham and added it to the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS). That’s false. ARC experts didn’t evaluate the need for the road, according to spokesman Louis Segesvary. “It was added to the system by legislative fiat,” he said –- that is to say, when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) added the designation to a 2004 appropriations bill, as we report in our story.

When Wiedmeyer refers to “a formula”, he’s talking about how the ARC divvies up its budget –- how much each state eligible for subsidies receives. And the Northern Beltline’s $3.327 billion budget threatens to overwhelm that formula, according to a Capitol Hill staffer with detailed knowledge of the dispute who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to comment publicly. Alabama’s share of ADHS funds prior to the authorization of the Beltline was six percent, according to the Hill staffer; with the Beltline added to the list of ADHS projects, Alabama will get 34 percent of that money. In other words, of the 13 states that are eligible for ADHS funds, one of them –- Alabama –- will eat up more than a third of the program’s available money. And again, most of that money is provided by taxpayers who live outside of the Appalachian region.

If it’s built, the Northern Beltline “will suck a lot of air out of the ADHS,” the Hill staffer said. “It’ll eat up project funds and keep other states from completing their own projects.”

That may be why House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN) proposed capping the Northern Beltline’s federal funding at $500 million in his draft of the Transportation Reauthorization (PDF; see page 168). The Hill staffer said that would force Alabama officials to seek the remainder of the funding through regular Federal Highway Administration channels, which would bring more federal oversight to the project. “The idea is to put Corridor X-1 [the Northern Beltline] back into the regular order” of federal highway programs, the staffer said.

Let’s move along in the clip. Wiedmeyer later says:

[T]he gasoline that’s bought in Alabama generates a certain amount of federal excise taxes, and those go to the Highway Trust Fund, and then those funds are then used to build the roads and bridges across America. And until recently we’ve been a donor state – in other words, we sent more than what we’ve gotten back….

This is what is known in highway policy circles as “the donor-donee problem” –- and it’s long been a source of debate and the topic of think-tank reports.

As I point out in the clip, federal data do not back up Wiedmeyer’s claim. According to a Federal Highway Administration document published in 2001 (PDF available through the Government Printing Office), Alabama has occasionally been a donor state –- in 11 of the past 35 years. Experts told me that’s typical, because states receive larger subsidies when they are in the midst of big highway construction projects and smaller ones when they are merely maintaining roads that already exist.

More recently, the data show that in 2007, Alabama actually got $1.20 in highway subsidies for every dollar its drivers paid in gas taxes. Over the life of the Highway Trust Fund, the state has received a subsidy of $1.12 for every dollar in taxes paid. That ranks Alabama 28th among all states and the District of Columbia –- right in the middle of the pack.

That actually undercounts how much of a subsidy Alabama receives, according to Ronald Utt, a senior research fellow for the conservative Heritage Foundation, because it doesn’t include subsidies for Appalachian Development Highway System roads. As a result, federal money for the Northern Beltline, I-22, Alabama State Route 24, U.S. Route 72, and I-565 make Alabama even more of a donee state.

When I point out to Wiedmeyer that Alabama is not, in fact, a donor state, he quickly changes tack:

Jefferson County –- where the Northern Beltline is going to go –- we have gotten 34 cents on the dollar from what we have sent in. So we have been –- this is a donor area.

I didn’t have county-level information at hand during the interview, so afterwards, I started digging. The Federal Highway Administration doesn’t track county-by-county data. Neither does the Internal Revenue Service. I asked Wiedmeyer to provide some backup for his claim. He sent along two documents (1 || 2) to make his case.

Four highway-funding experts who I asked to review the documents didn’t find them –- or Wiedmeyer’s argument –- persuasive.

Utt said the data, which covers the 1990s, is too old to be meaningful. “As a matter of course, if there’s only data that’s that old, I don’t use it,” he said. “I’d be skeptical about it.”

Others said the data didn’t answer the underlying question of whether Alabama deserved more in federal highway subsidies. “They’re mixing apples and oranges,” said a high-ranking highway analyst who works for a watchdog agency of the U.S. Government in Washington and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “The documents look at state gas taxes and state highway expenditures. That has almost nothing to do with federal taxes and federal spending.”In other words, Wiedmeyer is conflating local and federal data.

Nothing in the data Wiedmeyer provided has anything to do with highway policy in Washington, according to a highway funding expert affiliated with a public land-grant university who spoke on condition of anonymity because he serves as a consultant to various states’ departments of transportation. “The bottom line is that to the extent [Birmingham-area officials] have a beef, they have a beef with the state, not the federal government,” he said.

Robert Puentes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, agreed. “I have no doubt that Jefferson County is a net donor,” Puentes wrote in an email exchange after reviewing the transcript of the interview and my email back-and-forth with Wiedmeyer. “But note that the county status is not really the result of the federal law. The federal law puts so much discretion in the hands of the state that it is really an indictment of the state.”

What is more, experts said it is in urban areas’ interest to subsidize highways in rural areas. “If every county got ‘its share’, there’s not going to be enough money to maintain roads in areas where there are fewer people,” the highway-funding expert affiliated with the land-grant university said. “It’s not at all unusual for urban areas to subsidize roads in rural areas.”

In other words, “even if you don’t live there, you still have to drive through there,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Utt.

Utt and Puentes agreed that the Northern Beltline probably does not deserve billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.

“I am highly suspicious that the Northern Beltline will do anything positive to help the region meet any kind of economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability, or social equity goals,” Puentes wrote. “It will likely further serve to decentralize an already decentralizing metro area which flies in the face of [Wiedmeyer's] donor/donee argument. Just giving a metro area its fair share is not enough. There needs to be rigorous cost/benefit analysis applied to all projects.”

Utt said that if the road is built, only a select group would gain. “I’ve found that behind every road project is a landowner or developer who stands to benefit,” he said.

The most vocal opponents of Birmingham’s Northern Beltline have been environmentalists. They’re concerned that the highway will lead to sprawl and spread air pollution to the mostly-undeveloped land north of the city. But they’re especially worried about the effects that the road will have on two river basins –- the Cahaba and the Black Warrior –- which together provide most of the metropolitan area’s water supply.

Blueprint America spent an afternoon with Nelson Brooke, executive director of Black Warrior Riverkeeper, walking along Patton Creek, beneath Birmingham’s existing Southern Beltline. The stream is a tributary of the Cahaba, joining it downstream of the intakes for Birmingham’s water supply. Nonetheless, Brooke said it offered a good overview of the effects that highway construction –- and the commercial development that it causes –- have on streams and rivers.

Brooke and other environmentalists don’t want what’s happening to Patton Creek to be duplicated in northern Jefferson County. And they say the federal government is on their side: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrote in 1997 that the chosen alignment for the Northern Beltline “has the most impacts on natural resources” of any of the alternatives that the State of Alabama considered –- disrupting streams at 14 crossings, impacting more that 4,000 acres of forest, and destroying 68 acres of wetlands.

Advocates for the highway have taken aim at environmentalists: A coalition of businesses that pushes for the Northern Beltline calls the green groups “no-growthers” who want “onerous regulations”. Nelson Brooke denies the charge. “I’m a strong advocate for low-impact development,” he told me. “The type of development we are seeing around our Interstates is the exact opposite of that. It’s sprawling. It’s in total disregard of the natural environment and how it’s disrupting it. And so I would say I am anti- that sort of development, but not anti- any and all development.”