We can’t blame you if you are suspicious when the government says it doesn’t have enough money to fix yet another mess.

We were suspicious, too, when the Oregon Department of Transportation announced it was cutting back on snowplowing, painting highway lines, cleaning up graffiti and garbage because — it didn’t have the money.

If ODOT has a $6.1 billion budget, why does it have to cut back?

Legislators got an explanation Wednesday, Nov. 8, in a presentation from ODOT officials to the Joint Committee on Transportation.

One legislator declared the situation “a mess.” It is. But it is a mess legislators have been told was coming, and they didn’t do enough about it.

ODOT has a lot of money. Its budget is even bigger than in the past. ODOT can’t spend, though, the money it gets on anything it wants. Much of its money is rigidly dedicated to certain purposes, such as construction projects. Not operations and maintenance.

About $1.7 billion in revenue flows into the state highway fund over two years. That is a subset of ODOT’s funding eligible for spending on operations and maintenance. It’s made up of $489 million in DMV fees, $531 million in fees on heavy trucks and $700 million in taxes on fuels. Subtract the money that goes to cities and counties, the money for debt service, the money for capital programs and more, and the money left for operations and maintenance is $370 million.

“That number really hasn’t grown much in recent years,” Travis Brouwer, an ODOT assistant director, told legislators.

In fact, Brouwer said ODOT essentially has slowly been going broke for the past four years. For the last three two-year budget cycles, it has been making reductions in its budget and it is at the stage now “where the public is really feeling it,” he said, referring to the cuts in snowplowing and other maintenance.

The mess should not come as a surprise to legislators who have been listening to ODOT budget presentations. ODOT warned about it coming during the last legislative session. It has warned it was coming for years.

Reliance on a gas tax to help pay for roads doesn’t work as vehicles become more efficient or don’t even use gas. And it especially doesn’t work if other fees are not increased to compensate.

Oregon does not index ODOT’s taxes and fees to inflation. The state has not mandated a shift toward a mileage fee.

Those changes would not be popular. They are options that were on the table for legislators to choose. And they chose not to back them.

So Oregon is a state where government cuts back on highway safety.

State Sen. Chris Gorsek, D-Gresham, summed things up.

“This is where we are today,” he said. “This does not mean that it has to stay this way.

“… I certainly am very optimistic that we can find a way forward that will bring us out of this mess,” he added. “But it is a mess.”

He’s right — except Oregon is in this mess because legislators overseeing ODOT funding failed to act.