Reality Bites: Joe Ritchie is out, rising tax reality is in

A couple of things from today's news, neither cause for joy, at least to me.

FIRST -- A fond farewell and thanks to Joe Ritchie, Roy's now out-going mayor, defeated yesterday by Willard Cragun.

You know you've been around a long time, perhaps too long, when you are seeing the same faces over and over again in different jobs. I first met Joe Ritchie when he was Ogden's Chief of Police. He was a good guy, a straight shooter, perhaps not always as correct in his speech as he ought to have been, which if memory serves is why he got fired from his job a couple of years after I started, back in 1978.

My memory is notoriously spotty, so the facts of the situation are slippery to me, but I do have a clear memory that Joe got a raw deal from the city manager who was running the town back then.

"Say it ain't so, Joe," I told him then.

Joe went on to serve on the Weber County Commission, where I covered him again in my role as County government reporter. He was, again, a blunt guy who did things, and folks who do things are easy to attack, so I had to see him defeated for reelection in the 90s, sometime, I forget when.

Now after two terms he's out as Mayor of Roy. Well, they say, change is good, maybe time is catching up to Joe just as it did to me. I see a lot of Facebook posts on Cragun's page cheering the coming change, and I hope it's for the better.  I don't live in Roy and haven't followed its politics closely, but I hope folks cheering Cragun remember that Joe was a good guy who did things. Doing things is a great way to make enemies, and it's always easy to hope the new guy will do things better still.

Interestingly, Cragun was on the Roy City Council back in the early 90s when I was covering Roy City government. He's a good guy, I hope he does well. I also hope he remembers that it's easy to campaign on promises that life will be better with him on the job, but when you actually get the job reality has a nasty habit of stepping in and there you are, pissing folks off again.

Speaking of pissing folks off:

SECOND -- Interesting story in today's Standard (click) about Gov. Gary Herbert warning that Utah will have to raise its gasoline tax to pay for road repairs and construction.

Roads are expensive toys to build and maintain, and Utah has been on a binge of road building the last 20 years. Maintenance costs are rising just to keep the roads we have now in shape, but Herbert warns that billions more will be needed to build new highways that UDOT seems to think we need.

A hike in the gasoline tax is the most regressive of taxes around, and I'm sure Herbert, which an eye to Utah's "No New Taxes Ever!" Tea Party fanatics, is uneasy admitting that Utah may need to raise it.

Why is it regressive? The poor work marginal jobs, minimum wage or slightly better, and tend to drive older cars that get poorer mileage. They need to drive more, delivering children to day care, working multiple jobs. Gasoline is a larger part of their budget than most. They don't have the option of riding a bicycle, and even mass transit is hard because of the extra time it takes.

Raising the gasoline tax will be ironic, too.

The Tea Party-driven GOP's effort to cut federal spending means less money for transportation and it is federal money that has build all those long expensive roads through Utah's empty spaces. With federal spending declining -- and Herbert says this is a real possibility in a very few years -- the Tea Party/GOP chant from the 2012 election that "We built that ourselves" may come true in Utah in a very expensive way.

Something has to replace the federal funds that now pay for our roads, Herbert says, and the story quotes the US Chamber of Commerce that states in general could lose 25 percent of their transportation funding. In Utah, which has low population and big spaces, I bet it's more.

And, no, cutting the taxes we pay the fed will not replace what we have to pay for new road taxes. Those tax cuts favor the rich, while this gasoline tax will smack the poor.

Ogden Mayor Mike Caldwell has one alternative, riding his bicycle to work (click) next year, and I cheer his decision and will try to do the same. Bicycles are cheaper than cars to buy and maintain, but our roads still have a way to go before a lot of folks will be comfortable using them to commute.

Mass transit, and alternative transportation, are one way to mitigate the rising costs of the common transportation infrastructure we all have to pay for. Utah gets a lot more serious about mass transit and making our roads bicycle friendly, most Utahns are going to be stuck in their cars, paying ever higher taxes to build expensive roads that will, in turn, be more expensive to maintain.