CALIFORNIA SHORTCHANGED AGAIN STATE NEXT TO LAST PER CAPITA FOR HIGHWAY DOLLARS.

Byline: Lisa Friedman Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - California consistently tops national traffic congestion lists, but the Golden State sinks to the bottom of a new list, receiving less per capita than almost any other state under the new federal highway bill, a report issued Tuesday said.

Just as Los Angeles gets a fraction of the highway dollars that more rural counties in the state get, California's 35.9 million residents get about one-seventh of the money per person as Alaska's 655,000 residents.

For California, that works out to $95.54 a year per person over the six-year life of the multibillion-dollar highway reauthorization bill headed for President George W. Bush's desk. The only state that does worse is New York, at $87.58 per person.

By contrast, Alaska, population 655,000 - represented by U.S. Rep. Don Young, chairman of the House Transportation Committee - stands to get as much at $649.84 per person. Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota and Vermont do almost as well as Alaska.

``California sitting at the bottom of these percentages is unfortunate to say the least,'' said Tim Ransdell, director of the California Institute for Federal Policy Research, a D.C.-based think tank.

In sheer dollar figures, California outpaced every other state in the $286.4 billion federal highway bill. Between a slight increase in rate of return from federal gas tax revenues and other transit funds, the nation's most populous state will see an average of $3.4 billion annually over the next six years, Department of Transportation figures show.

Keith Ashdown, spokesman for the D.C.-based watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted that the smaller states that do well in highway funding, not surprisingly, are home to some of the most influential members of the transportation committees.

``There's this fiction that this bill is based on need, when it's based on who is in political power,'' he said.

Justin Harclerode, spokesman for Young, acknowledged that the chairman's position helped his state. But he also pointed out that California gets far more overall than any other state, and pointed out that every region has valid transportation needs.

Rep. Gary Miller, R-Brea, a member of the House Transportation Committee, said some skewing toward small states is appropriate.

Noting that the entire population of Alaska about equals that of his congressional district, Miller said, ``If they had the same per-capita funding as California did, there'd be no roads in Alaska. And if you don't have the dollars, you'd never have interstate commerce.''

Ransdell concurred.

``There aren't enough people in Wyoming to pay for the interstate highways that we all agree we want to see cross it.''

But, he argued, the federal highway formulas Congress uses were created decades ago to help spark interstate construction. They should be updated to reflect the fact that what highways need most these days is maintenance.

That would require changing a formula based on a combination of miles of road in a state, usage and gas tax receipts to one based more heavily on road usage. And as long as sparsely populated states that benefit from the current formula wield congressional power, things aren't likely to change much, he said.

Lisa Friedman, [phone]

lisa.friedman(at)langnews.com

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SOURCE: Daily News research