The Illinois capital plan remains a major unfinished piece of business that state legislators hope to push through this spring. But with the impending Senate impeachment trial, it’s hard to imagine there is going to be much movement on this front in the near future. So let’s take a look at the Iowa statehouse, where lawmakers -- as in several other states nationwide -- are trying to put people back to work on their own dime.

During an interview with Radio Iowa Friday, Gov. Chet Culver (D) said he is pushing a state-funded infrastructure package that he hopes will improve Iowa’s roads and electric transmission system as well as its levees, wastewater treatment plants, and recreational trails projects. While he didn’t offer a specific size, the governor estimated that for every $100 million invested in infrastructure projects, 4,000 new jobs are created. Yesterday, Senate President Jack Kibbie took Culver’s message to the Senate floor. The Iowa Independent has the goods:

It’s time for Iowa to declare a “war on potholes” and put people back to work, and the first step to that is an increase in the state’s gas tax, said this morning in his opening remarks to the legislature.

“Success in that endeavor will mean better roads, jobs, and an economic boost to Iowa’s families and communities,” Kibbie said. “While there may be funds for these efforts as part of the federal economic recovery package, we also need to act.”

Like so many nationwide, Iowa’s economy is in need of a boost. While the state’s unemployment rate is only 4.3 percent, its Leading Indicators Index fell 0.9 percent from October to November, the largest decline since the index began more than two years ago. Furthermore, the 2009 budget already has a $100 million hole.

But as Ed Kilgore argued last month, while infrastructure investments are important in the long term, don’t expect them to quickly reverse the economic trends in any single state. For that to happen, we’ll need a large stimulus at the federal level that is “carefully coordinated” with the states:

As someone who worked for three governors back in the day, I can confidently point to another temptation facing state and local leaders that needs to be taken into account: the natural but completely absurd pretense that they can somehow turn their own economies around in the current global crisis. Sure, states and localities can critically influence their long-range economic prospects through a variety of policies such as educational and infrastructure investments. But their counter-cyclical clout is limited, and any “stimulus packages” enacted in the states, whether it’s Democratic service expansions or Republican tax cuts, will probably only make things worse unless they are carefully coordinated with federal policies.

Still, with our own capital plan lagging behind, it will be interesting to watch Iowa grapple with how to foot the bill for this package. Culver favors bonds or privatizing the state’s lottery while Kibbie would like to see the state raise its gas tax. Meanwhile, here in Illinois, a similar debate is emerging over how to pay for infrastructure improvements, with some proposing expanded gaming and others pushing a gas tax increase. We’ll be following both battles closely in the coming months.  And we'll have more on the local debate over the gas tax later this week.