Commentary; Posted: 4/4/07
Gas tax a way to build transportation momentum
We had hoped that gridlock over transportation funding — a blemish on Minnesota politics for at least two decades — had bottomed out in 2005, when Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed a bipartisan bill containing a gasoline tax increase and other revenue boosters.
The 2005 Legislature did authorize a referendum on the full use of vehicle sales taxes for road and transit projects. Voters passed it in 2006, which will eventually boost transportation funding by $300 million annually.
2007 is no time to lose momentum. Flush with their new majorities, DFL lawmakers want to raise funding for roads, bridges and transit by up to $1 billion a year.
The centerpiece of funding packages in both the House and the Senate is the same 10-cent increase in the 20-cent state gas tax that the Republican governor vetoed two years ago.
We hope the theatrical mid session showdown over transportation taxes simmers into a late-session compromise. Regardless of the merits of other DFL proposals — most notably, a metrowide transportation sales tax — Minnesotans deserve the sturdy and lasting funding a gas-tax increase provides. It’s time.
You bet citizens are frustrated by traffic tie-ups that waste fuel, squander family time, foul the air and make Minnesota less livable. In a state that hasn’t raised its gas tax since 1988 — not even to keep pace with inflation — the tiresome litany of transportation shortcomings bears repeating.
The Texas Transportation Institute places the Twin Cities region near the top nationally in growth of traffic congestion. Some two-lane highways in rural Minnesota are unsafe and unsuited for traffic growth, says the Minnesota Transportation Alliance, a coalition that includes road builders and local governments.
Sixty-five percent of freeway travel in the Twin Cities occurs under congested conditions, the alliance reports. Minnesota’s road and transit needs are underfunded by $1 billion a year, the Transportation Policy Institute said in 2001.
An increase in the gas tax, which is constitutionally dedicated to roads and bridges, would complement the dedicated funding given to transit through a portion of the vehicle sales tax.
The gas tax is a stable, sustainable and fair way for users to help build highways, U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, 8th District, said in a 2005 speech at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies.
The new chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee says the federal gas tax approved in 1956 was the rock upon which the interstate highway system, conceived many years earlier, was built. Even with incrementally higher use of alternative-fuel vehicles, it will remain a funding centerpiece for years to come.
Minnesota’s high-tax tradition doesn’t extend to its gas tax. The state ranks 27th. Its 20-cent tax generated $630 million in the 2004 fiscal year.
Pawlenty rejects the gas tax’s pay-as-you-go approach in favor of borrowing additional transportation money. He’s proposing $1.7 billion in bonding this year after passing a smaller bonding measure in 2003.
Piling up debt — whose repayment will pinch future transportation budgets — with little regard for the stability of transportation’s long-term fiscal health is a tactic, not a serious policy.
In 2007, lawmakers have a chance to set things right. — An opinion from the ECM Editorial Board. The Forest Lake Times is part of ECM Publishers, Inc.
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