Call To Action

by Greg Mumm

May 2005

This month is a call to action folks!  Time to write a letter.  You do remember how to do that don’t you? 

Here is the deal.  The Recreational Trails Program (aka: RTP) is a part of the large federal highway bill (large meaning roughly 275 billion) working it’s way through Congress right now.  The RTP funding program is a “user-pay/user-benefit” of the Highway Trust Fund.  Basically, what happens is a portion of the tax we pay on fuels is set aside and apportioned back to states for trails programs.  30 percent is supposed to go for motorized, 30 percent is for non-motorized and 40 percent is to be used for shared-use.  The RTP program in SD is going to be very critical as a means of funding portions of the Trail System we are working so hard for. 

That said, the House of Representative has recommended and passed a transportation bill that included $503 million to go for the RTP funding over 5 years.  Unfortunately, the Senate is now considering the same thing for only $270 million in RTP funds.  The $503 million version passed by the House would mean $6 million dollars for South Dakota.  The Senate version would cut this back severely leaving nearly $2 million less for South Dakota. 

I know that $503 million over 5 years seems like a lot of jing-jang but there are a lot of considerations here.  For example, a congressionally mandated study estimated that $167 million is collected annually and another subsequent review found the estimate could be as high as $286 million annually.  At $503 million over 5 years, that is less than half of what is collected to be returned to the purpose for which it was collected- The Recreational Trails Program.  Now, I’m not sure what gives anyone the right to just arbitrarily take funding that was intended for a specific purpose and redirect it to somewhere else in the first place.  In the second place, it is doubly frustrating to have the Senate cut it back by nearly another half!  This is unacceptable and just plain wrong. 

The reason it got through the House like it did at the level it did is because there were a couple of Representatives who championed RTP funding through the House.  We obviously need a champion in the Senate to get the funding up to the levels of the House version.  

Guess what?  Senator Thune is on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which is the committee that considered what the Recreational Trails get funded at in the Senate.  That makes him important for our purposes because he could be that champion in the Senate in several ways.  I am asking you to write him a letter and let him know how important this funding is to South Dakota.  I am also asking you to ask your friends to write him a letter too.   

This is so important for motorized and non-motorized.  The South Dakota Off Highway Vehicle Coalition has been working with the local mountain bikers and IMBA to try to get the Senate version back up.  That shows how important this is to everyone! Now, more than ever, we need that funding to put to work in South Dakota.