Road bill pleases Gibbons

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No, $1 billion in new road funding won’t take care of all of Nevada’s highway needs, Gov. Jim Gibbons concedes. But the governor hopes it’ll do for now.

Gibbons, in Las Vegas for the ceremonial signing of a new transportation funding bill Thursday, said the plan allows him to maintain his no new taxes pledge while letting the state start on a long list of highway improvements aimed at heading off crippling gridlock in the coming years.

“We came to what I think is a remarkable solution,” Gibbons said. “Is it a silver bullet? Of course it’s not. But it will move us forward.”

The deal that passed the Legislature earlier this month, Assembly Bill 595, will divert around $1 billion in existing tax revenues now going to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, rental car companies and local governments.

And it followed the Legislature’s rejection of a much larger cash diversion from the LVCVA proposed by Gibbons, and the governor’s opposition to a series of proposed tax hikes to fill a funding gap initially pegged at $5 billion.

“We didn’t always agree, but we agreed we have an issue and a crisis and a problem with transportation in Nevada,” Gibbons said.

Symbolic of compromise, Gibbons was joined at the signing by tax diversion opponent Rossi Ralenkotter, president of the LVCVA; Clark County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury, who chairs the Regional Transportation Commission and lobbied for more funding; Assembly Transportation Committee chairman Kelvin Atkinson, D-North Las Vegas; Senate Transportation Committee chairman Dennis Nolan, R-Las Vegas; and state Transportation Director Susan Martinovich.

The new funds will allow the Nevada Department of Transportation to add new lanes to Interstate 15 from downtown Las Vegas to Craig Road and from Sahara Avenue to Blue Diamond Road (state Route 160) by 2011, and widen U.S. Highway 95 from Washington Avenue to Craig, starting in 2009.

“There are other priorities, but I-15 always has to be at the top of every list,” Woodbury said.

Other projects, including the widening U.S. 95 from downtown Las Vegas through Henderson, building a U.S. Highway 93 bypass around Boulder City, and improvements to I-15 between downtown Las Vegas and Sahara, will have to wait for more funding before work can begin.

Unless an unexpected windfall is found, it’s unlikely work on any of those projects will start before 2013, at the earliest. Gibbons said that’s OK, arguing that starting on all projects simultaneously would trap Las Vegas Valley drivers in a picket of cone zones.

“If we had all $5 billion sitting on the table today, we couldn’t start every highway project,” Gibbons said. “It would bring the whole city and state into complete gridlock and chaos due to road construction.”

The governor said the search for new funds will start now, with the hope that new revenues that don’t come from new taxes can be found and approved by the Legislature when it next meets in regular session two years from now.

Options Gibbons would like to explore include using public-private partnerships to build new roads and creating express toll lanes that give drivers the option of using existing “free” lanes or paying a toll to use less congested lanes.