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Born and raised in Mississippi, you'll just go back this way, get in the right lane. Brad White knows these roads inside and out. Mill Street is one of the main arteries here in in downtown Jackson and just like some other arteries, these streets are clogged with problems. We experienced it firsthand hitting potholes, cracks, and uneven pavement, something those who travel the roads in Jackson and across the country deal with daily. It's something that. All other parts of what we do in our daily lives rely on is that's good infrastructure being able to get from point *** to B. More than 18% of all roads in the US are in poor condition based on their roughness score. That's according to *** Hearst Television data team analysis of the 2022 road condition data. That's more than 143,000 miles of roads in need of repair. It takes *** lot of money to purchase the asphalt and concrete equipment. White knows the challenge of covering the costs. I'm the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Transportation. Do people ever call your agency and go, Why haven't you fixed my local street? Oh yeah, everybody sees Department of Transportation and assumes that we're in charge of all roads and all bridges around the state, and that's not true. That's an important distinction. Money to fix town or city streets mostly comes from local taxes and fees. The Federal Highway Trust Fund covers the cost of some state roads and our vital interstate system. As population grows, as traffic grows, we need to have the revenue necessary to build out that system. Unfortunately that takes *** lot of money to do that, but the Highway Trust fund's money is on the verge of drying up. Now the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is meeting to solve the problem. The fund will run out of money again in mid 2028. The way it's designed is that if you use the road, there's *** user fee that you're charged, and that's through fuel tax, whether that's diesel tax or gas tax. The committee will take the first steps. US Congressman Sam Graves is chairman of the committee. We need to find *** better way to collect those dollars. Every time you gas your car, about 18 cents per gallon is poured into the Highway Trust Fund. That hasn't been adjusted since 1993. For the last two decades, the fund has been spending more than what it's bringing in to fill the gap, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars gets pulled from the general fund. Do you feel like we're putting *** band-aid over the problem rather than fixing it? It is *** band-aid when you use money from general revenue, and what that also means is that everybody's paying. So he's proposing *** new different solution. What it is is *** $250 registration fee annually for electric vehicles and *** $100 registration fee for hybrid vehicles. This will be the first new money in the Highway Trust fund in over 30 years. Would collecting taxes from EV owners help solve the insolvency that the Highway Trust Fund is facing? It'll go *** long way towards helping that. It's not going to solve the problem. We reached out to over 2 dozen lawmakers to ask if there's *** solution to this funding gap. While some were initially interested in talking to us, only Congressman Graves followed through. Why is the conversation about road infrastructure so difficult? When you're doing something new like we're trying to do with the Highway Trust fund funding it, um, you know, it's different and different things come *** little harder. *** conversation that's meaningful to those who run state departments of transportation because if the highway trust fund runs out and there's no solution roads will continue to get worse and remain unrepaired. Whether it's maintenance or whether it's new construction where you're advancing the system that take time to build and to plan and so we need recurring revenue that we can count on.