Like virtually every state these days Nevada is wondering how to pay for road maintenance. So “The Nevada Department of Transportation is hosting a meeting Tuesday to announce a new study on alternatives to fuel taxes to pay for road maintenance,” reports the Las Vegas Sun.
Stories like this are popping up in news media all over the country and they can be hard to read because these meetings are not undertaken with optimism so much as they are fishing or searching expeditions hoping they might stumble upon something. But there are no surefire short- or even medium-term alternatives to fuel taxes awaiting to be discovered at meetings.
The Sun story does however make it clear that NDOT — like a lot of other state DOTs — now realizes the urgency of doing something, and beginning by including the public in the loop. Hello, Washington, are you there? Later? OK
Oh, by the way, if you go to this story page, or the home page for the Sun, you’ll see a lot of buttons atop the screen that let you know all of the places you can do in the newspaper, all the subjects covered, and the sections available. I see hundreds of these newspaper homepages every week, but to my recollection this is the only newspaper with it’s own, permanent, Elvis section.