Pass the transportation lock box amendment

As a retired 42-year veteran of the logistics industry, I strongly oppose calls from some public interest groups to vote down the Illinois Constitutional Amendment preventing pols from raiding the state transportation fund to pay for state services other than repairing/replacing roads, bridges and other critically needed infrastructure. Infrastructure is the state's circulatory system. Neglect it, as state leaders have done for years, and your put the state body politic at great risk, just as if you spent money for personal heart health on fatty foods, drugs and booze, destroying your own precious circulatory system.

Opponents want lawmakers stop raiding the fund to balance the budget. Yet they don't advocate for a fair and adequate progressive state income tax which could support critical state services, including the social safety net, without having to steal from protecting the most important structural component of personal safety while traveling the state. Motorists pay user fees they rightly expect be used to keep infrastructure safe, preventing damage to their vehicles and their bodies. 

Some opponents trivialize infrastructure as mere opportunity to give lawmakers "the opportunity to scissor pretty red ribbons back home." Those pretty red ribbons provide good middle class jobs which pay desperately needed state taxes. Those pretty red ribbons keep folks off welfare. Those pretty red ribbons could save your life.