Adley said all of those items are funded through the Transportation Trust Fund, but the fund has not provided what it should for state projects. This year the state will spend $27 million from the fund on maintenance for state roadways and bridges. However, Adley said the Louisiana State Police will get $60 million from the fund. Louisiana law allows the state police to get funding from the Transportation Trust Fund for traffic control proposes.

Adley contends the law was intended to be incident specific, but money from the trust is being used to fund the state police budget, he said. “So this year the state police get $60 million while we’re going spending $27 million on roads and that’s wrong,” Adley said.

The Republican senator from Benton said the state needs to re-evaluate the way it’s spending money. Adley is a member of the task force that met Monday and approved a list of ideas to chip away at the backlog.

But rather than offer specific recommendations, the Transportation Funding Task Force is forwarding all the ideas it heard, without prioritizing proposals, to lawmakers. Instead, the panel will let them sift through concepts to see which generate the most interest. Its report was due to lawmakers this week.

Task force chair Rep. Karen St. Germain, D-Pierre Part, said she hopes lawmakers will consider some ideas in the two-month regular legislative session that begins in April.

“What this funding task force has done, it has started the discussion,” she said.

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