How State Legislators Frame It: Transportation Funds and Energy Transition

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Abstract

The Role of State Legislatures in Transportation Energy Transition: State legislatures play a key role in the collection and disposition of public revenues to support transportation infrastructure in the U.S. Every state collects a per-gallon excise tax on the sale of motor fuels. These taxes provide a significant share of state funding for the maintenance and rehabilitation of roads and bridges and, in some states, for the facilities and services supporting public transit and other transportation modes. State legislation is needed to adjust the rate or structure of existing fuel taxes and other transportation taxes and fees and to adopt any new transportation revenues. Legislators also typically oversee the budgets and expenditures of state transportation agencies.

Given their responsibility for generating and allocating transportation revenue, state legislators confront policy issues around decarbonization, regardless of the presence or absence of state policy commitments to energy transition and decarbonization. Changing options for transportation energy sources increasingly promise to reduce consumption of conventional motor fuels, underscored by General Motors’ recent announcement that it would phase out production of petroleum-fueled vehicles and offer only zero-emission vehicles by 2035. The accelerating shift to electric vehicles promises to sink fuel tax revenues, already long weakened by more fuel-efficient conventional cars and by newer hybrid vehicles. Although over 30 states including Wyoming, California, North Carolina, and Arkansas have increased their state motor fuel taxes since 2013, very few have made larger structural moves to address the sure blow to transportation revenues from energy changes.

Research Questions: Informed by perspectives from political science as well as public finance and economics, this research work asks how statehouse lawmakers understand the connection between the energy transition underway in transportation and the state resources available for transport infrastructure and services. As the transportation industry moves increasingly toward low carbon energy sources, how do state lawmakers view the most important policy problems facing their states in the transportation realm? When lawmakers consider energy transition or decarbonization, what concerns are most important to them, and how do they discuss or frame the issues? To what stakeholders and sources of information do they look for cues about this policy area?

Research Methods: This project surveys the roughly 1,700 statehouse lawmakers involved in transportation and energy across U.S. state legislatures. Before launching this national survey, a first study phase convened five focus groups with geographically diverse state legislators working at the intersection of transportation and energy policy in summer and fall of 2020. Designed to inform development of the national survey instrument, the focus groups explored legislators’ perceptions of transportation policy, including the nature and salience of the challenges faced, perceived solutions, opportunities or constraints to enacting policy change, and relevant stakeholders. The study’s second phase, now underway, is developing the national survey instrument, to be pilot tested and administered in Spring of 2021. The survey will address a number of thematic areas, including agenda setting within state legislatures, the role of frames in state transportation policymaking, and legislators’ sources of policy information and policy learning.

Contribution: Absent coordinated national policy to guide the transition towards less carbon intensive energy use patterns, policies addressing energy transition have largely been left to subnational governments. State legislators decide central questions about how to marshal and use resources for transportation investment in their states. Our exploration of legislators’ perceptions about these choices and their connection to energy transition promises to shed light on how state policy elites frame problems in this domain, what concerns are most salient, and where they look for cues and information. Further, the survey data also enable examination of the circumstances under which state lawmakers might be likely to facilitate or ignore energy transition in the transportation sector.

Authors

• Gian-Claudia Sciara, The University of Texas at Austin

• Ross Buchanan, University of Texas, Austin

• Andrew Waxman, University of Texas at Austin