Gas Tax

Earlier this week, I attended a California Sustainable Transportation Funding Workshop, hosted by Caltrans, Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the California Transportation Commission (CTC), and the Mileage-Based User Fee Alliance (MBUFA). The half-day program focused on how the state of California could shift from our current gas tax funding stream to one based on a per-mile fee.

The California Legislature saw a lot of action in the last two weeks on bills related to sustainable transportation. The deadline to pass bills out of committee was on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, and today is the deadline for all bills to be voted on by their houses of origin. If they couldn't pass by today from the Senate to the Assembly, or vice versa, then they died for this session.

CA Senator Darrell Steinberg proposed a change yesterday to California's nascent cap-and-trade program that would replace next year's cap on fuel emissions with a per-gallon carbon tax. Steinberg called it a “broader, more stable, and more flexible” way to reduce emissions from fuels than cap-and-trade.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Congressman Tom Graves (R-Georgia) have introduced a bill to eliminate federal involvement in transportation policy, which would spell disaster for funding that supports transit, biking, and walking. A largely symbolic vote in favor of "devolution" will allow Republican members of Congress to demonstrate their conservative bona fides.

I know it's tempting to gloat.

One nay-sayer argument against greater federal spending for transportation goes like this: “Too many faceless bureaucrats in Washington have too much control over how states spend their money. Let states raise their own revenues and spend them as they wish.”

Connecticut state senators just voted to increase the state gas tax by three cents. The New Hampshire House Speaker has proposed cutting theirs by five cents – but only for two months, to help drivers bear the pain of high gas prices. In Georgia, the gas tax jumps every time gas prices go up by 25 cents. And at least one U.S. Senator is suggesting that more states start taking transportation funding into their own hands.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee just spent two days listening to 40 experts from different aspects of the transportation sector and advocacy community, from engineers to environmentalists to the Tea Party. Each person had just four minutes to speak and they crammed as much as they could into their time: observations, demands, recommendations for a better transportation bill. Their ideas were widely divergent on many points, but on one, they found unity: This should not be a smaller bill than the one that came before it.

Senator Barbara Boxer got down to brass tacks on transportation funding in a committee hearing yesterday, even as DOT Secretary Ray LaHood remained vague on how to pay for the president's ambitious proposal. Boxer said she’s not in favor of raising the gas tax, but she’d like it to be indexed to inflation. “We don’t even know if the president would go that far with us,” she said, but clearly something needs to be done.