This is a microcosm of a larger systemic problem with state budgets that started with the Sixteenth Amendment. Not because income taxes are bad (they're fine) but because that was the first step in a process where nearly all revenue in the United States is collected by the federal government. This was a shift from the original situation where the government was funded by excise taxes and most taxes were collected by the states. This didn't become a problem however until the federal government's fiscal advantage became so large that federal outlays began to dominate state budgets.
The result is a growing clusterfuck of incentives that would make Roman Polanski blush. State governments used to get more money by growing their states' economies. Now they pursue the twin goals of getting more money from Uncle Sam and generating more of the kinds of economic activity that they can most easily derive revenue from, because federal income taxes are too high for states to collect very much money from income tax, and because states compete against each other to lower taxes to attract businesses so are better off seeking federal funds than raising taxes. If a state raised its own taxes to build roads they'd never overbuild the network like this. It's completely insane.
It's possible that the election of Senators by state legislatures also served to prevent this slow transfer of fiscal power from happening during the first century of our country's existence.