GARVEE gets final legislative approval

BOISE - New financial bonding authority of $134 million within a $998 million statewide roads improvement borrowing program gained final legislative approval Monday.

The Senate approved the legislation on a 29-6 vote, sending it to Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, who pushed for the third annual installment of the Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicle (GARVEE) program money during his initial legislative agenda announced in early January.

Carried on the Senate floor by Sen. Jim Hammond, R-Post Falls, House Bill 657 encountered little resistance.

Promoters say the basic idea for GARVEE, introduced as “Connecting Idaho,” in Idaho three years ago by then-Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, is to get a jump on escalating road construction costs by borrowing the money for road repairs and expansions.

The money is expected to be paid back by eventual federal highway dollars.

“GARVEE doesn't provide any new money,” Hammond said. “It only provides that money sooner.”

Hammond said a “construction boom in China,” has sent the costs of road construction materials skyrocketing.

Idaho highways built several decades ago are seriously outdated, Hammond said.

“We have grown at a very rapid rate,” in Idaho, Hammond said. “And we have put a huge demand on infrastructure that was built when Idaho was much smaller. The interstate system that goes through Post Falls was designed when Post Falls a city, actually almost a village, of about 2,000. It's now 25,000.”

This year's $134 million GARVEE bonding authority extension, according to information provided by the Idaho Transportation Department, doesn't include any new money for the in-progress GARVEE roads projects in North Idaho.

Sen. Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, said the list of 13 original projects on the measure would enable the Idaho Transportation Board to fund anywhere on the list although state lawmakers in recent years had pared the projects to six statewide.

Schroeder said constructing the originally-proposed “Indian Valley” route in southern Idaho would harm prime elk habitat sought by sportsmen. Schroeder, who described the project as a four-lane freeway through a rural area, tried unsuccessfully to remove the reference in the bill to the project.

“This is a bad bill, it's a special interest bill,” Schroeder said. “And it's going to have a deleterious effect on natural resources . . . We're gonna lose forever a tremendous resource for the sportsmen, I'm gonna say, of southern Idaho. And I think we should just do away with that project forever.”

But Hammond said the project Schroeder talked about isn't any longer on the ITD priority list.

“I do not see the Idaho Transportation Board diverting this money to other projects,” Hammond said.

Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, said the legislation leaves it open to the ITD Board to decide where to spend the GARVEE roads money.

“I certainly understand people having hard feelings about a project being in there, or not being in there,” Cameron said. “But remember, we're not the transportation board. That's their role. Our role is simply to financially evaluate how they will spend the money and give them the spending authority should they need the money.”

The Idaho Legislature authorized bonding authority for $450 million for GARVEE projects during the 2006 and 2007 legislative sessions.