President Trump unveiled his plan to overhaul the U.S.’s infrastructure this week, and the initiative is raising some big questions on the High Plains.
The plan essentially calls for local municipalities to pay for their own upgrades. And this in turn would mean that cities and counties would be forced to turn to borrowing, taxing, tolling or cutting budgets at the local level. For states like Oklahoma, which has been struggling beneath the weight of a massive budget crisis for years, finding room in the budget for a huge infrastructure overhaul simply isn’t feasible.
Meanwhile, as The Houston Chronicle notes, the plan also doesn’t offer many answers for how wealthy states like Texas would pay for all this new construction. While the Trump plan does offer some Federal grants to cover the work, the plan doesn’t identify any new public revenue streams for where those federal dollars will come from.
