FOLEY — Alabama lawmakers will likely take up a long-delayed increase to the state’s gas tax when the 2019 legislative session opens in March, according to Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh, who told a Foley business audience that infrastructure funding has become impossible to avoid.
Marsh, who represents District 12 in east Alabama and includes the cities of Anniston and Jacksonville, spoke at a Leadership Series Luncheon hosted by the South Baldwin Chamber of Commerce at the Foley Civic Center on Nov. 28. He told the crowd that education and infrastructure are the two issues weighing most heavily on him as the new session approaches.
“I think you can see legislation dealing with — and I’ll say the dreaded word — a gas tax,” Marsh said, acknowledging the political risk of the subject before laying out why he believes the state can no longer put it off.
The setting was no accident. Baldwin County is the fastest-growing county in Alabama, its population surging with new subdivisions, beach-bound tourists and retirees, and its roads — Highway 98, Highway 59, the Foley Beach Express, the interstate spur to Gulf Shores — have become the most visible symptoms of the state’s funding gap in the entire state. Local officials in Foley, Gulf Shores, Daphne and Fairhope have spent years asking Montgomery for help with roads their own growth has strained, so an audience of Baldwin County business leaders needed little convincing that the status quo was unsustainable.
Marsh is seeking another term as pro tem when the Legislature reconvenes in January, and he used the Foley appearance to put fellow senators on notice. He said he wants colleagues who support his return to the leadership post to also be ready to act on tough votes.
“Think hard about it, because when January comes around and it’s time to vote pro tem and my name is on there,” Marsh said. “If you’re not willing to step up and do some of the bolder things the state needs in education and infrastructure, I’m not your guy. I want to see something done.”
The message amounted to a leadership contract: senators who backed Marsh for the chamber’s top post were, in his telling, signing on to the agenda that came with it. Alabama Senate leaders in recent sessions had watched infrastructure bills die repeatedly, and Marsh — a Anniston-area businessman by background who has led the Senate since 2010 — was signaling he intended the 2019 session to be different, with his own gavel on the line.
A port at the center of the plan
Central to Marsh’s infrastructure push is the Port of Mobile, which he described as a major economic engine that could see even greater returns with a deeper shipping channel. He said state leaders are discussing directing a share of any new gas tax revenue to the Alabama Port Authority to help fund that work.
“If we can deepen that port then we can double the amount of commerce coming and going, and that’s important to the state of Alabama,” Marsh said. “We are talking about taking a percentage of any tax increase to go to the port authority. We believe there’s going to be federal money that can be matched to deepen the harbor to make these improvements we need to continue to make at the port.”
The port argument carried weight in a room full of Baldwin County businesspeople. The State Docks sit downstream of everything Baldwin and Mobile counties do — the container terminal, the steel and coal exports, the growing auto logistics trade, the forest products moving through the nation’s ninth-largest port by volume. Channel depth determines which ships can call: the newest generation of container vessels drafts deeper than the harbor’s existing channel, and every foot of depth translates directly into cargo a ship can carry through the Panama Canal route that connects Asia to the Gulf.
Marsh said conversations throughout the latter half of 2018 have repeatedly returned to infrastructure needs, including the port project, and that Gov. Kay Ivey has signaled she intends to make the port part of any infrastructure package that reaches her desk. “I spoke with the governor three weeks ago, and any infrastructure bill the governor is going to be connected with will have an element for the port in it,” Marsh said.
The alignment between the Senate’s leadership and the governor’s office mattered for a practical reason: no gas tax bill has ever reached an Alabama governor’s desk without both chambers first swallowing it, and governors have historically been the ones to sign or veto road funding into law. Ivey had served as state treasurer and lieutenant governor before ascending to the top office, and she had spent her early tenure pressing the case that Alabama could not maintain what it already owned. A governor ready to sign, a Senate leader ready to vote and a House that had watched the issue stall for a decade made 2019, by the standards of Montgomery arithmetic, the most open window the state had seen in a generation.
What Marsh proposed in Foley was not a plan assembled overnight. His Senate had commissioned studies of the state’s infrastructure deficit, heard presentations from county engineers on bridges posted for weight limits, and watched neighboring states move while Alabama stood still. The Foley luncheon — one stop in a round of appearances before civic clubs and chambers across the state — was the public side of that work, the moment a private consensus began being argued in front of the voters who would have to ratify it at the next election.
26 years flat
Any push to raise Alabama’s gas tax faces a difficult history. Lawmakers last increased the tax to 18 cents per gallon in 1992, and it has not moved since, even as vehicles have become more fuel-efficient and traffic has continued to wear down roads and bridges across the state.
The consequences of a quarter-century freeze compound quietly. Construction costs have roughly tripled since 1992, vehicles travel many more miles on many more lanes, and cars burn less fuel per mile — so the same 18 cents per gallon buys a steadily shrinking share of what the road program needs. Alabama’s per-gallon rate had fallen behind every state that borders it and most states in the nation, leaving the Alabama Department of Transportation and county governments stretching revenues across a backlog of resurfacing, bridge replacements and new capacity projects, including the long-planned Gulf Coast route upgrades that Baldwin County officials have chased for decades.
Marsh argued that the flat, per-gallon structure of the tax is part of the problem. “It’s not like sales tax, where you pay a certain percentage,” Marsh said. “It’s a flat number, and that number has stayed flat for 26 years. I want an index model, and what we’re looking at is the Consumer Price Index. The fuel tax would be increased based on the Consumer Price Index, but have floors and ceilings where it can’t go more than a certain amount per year.”
That indexing approach, Marsh said, would let the tax keep pace with inflation and construction costs automatically rather than requiring lawmakers to revisit the politically fraught issue every few years, while still capping how much drivers could see the rate climb annually.
The idea had precedent. Several states had already tied fuel taxes to an index, and the model’s appeal to legislators is structural as much as fiscal: it moves the annual adjustment out of the Statehouse, where every vote is recorded, and into a formula nobody has to campaign against. Marsh’s proposed floors and ceilings were the political hedge — protection against the argument that an unmoored index could someday spike — and a signal that the Senate leader was drafting the bill to survive both an election and an argument.
Education in the same breath
On education, Marsh said he wants the state to move away from treating Pre-K, K-12 and higher education as separate systems with separate plans and instead build a single comprehensive strategy spanning all levels. “We’re working on these things with the goal to bump up the expectation of education and reward educators throughout this state,” he said.
The education piece of Marsh’s agenda tied back to the economic argument for infrastructure. Alabama’s voluntary First Class Pre-K program had won national recognition for quality but reached only a fraction of eligible children, and the state’s universities and community colleges — including Coastal Alabama Community College and the University of South Alabama in the southern part of the state — depend on the same revenue streams that growth pressures squeeze. Marsh’s suggestion that the state reward educators pointed toward salary discussions that had been building in the Senate, as neighboring states’ pay scales pulled Alabama teachers across the lines.
Marsh’s comments add to a growing chorus among state leaders that 2019 could be the year Alabama finally revisits road and bridge funding, a debate that has stalled in previous sessions despite warnings from local officials across Baldwin and Mobile counties about deteriorating infrastructure and mounting maintenance backlogs.
For the Foley audience, the question was less whether the state would act than what the package would look like when it did — how much, indexed or flat, and how much of it would come back down south, where the growth is. Marsh had given them his answer: a gas tax bill, a share for the port, an index to keep pace with time, and a demand that his colleagues vote for it.