Posted on 05/21/2005 8:56:17 AM PDT by agitator
Oregon tests novel mileage tax
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The program is the first step in a long-term plan to replace the state's gasoline tax, which pays for about 40 percent of Oregon 's road projects. As in many states, Oregon officials are worried gas tax revenues won’t be able to keep up with the rising costs of road building, especially with improved mileage from both traditional and hybrid cards.
Driver advocates and environmentalists said they will be watching the new program to make sure that it charges drivers fairly and that it does not give consumers an excuse to keep driving gas-guzzling cars.
Testing will start in September when the state transportation department plans to equip 20 privately owned cars with electronic odometers to record their mileage at gas stations. When drivers fill up, specially equipped gas pumps will read the mileage and charge 1.2 cents for every mile driven instead of the state's tax of 24 cents per gallon of gas.
The cars also will have Global Positioning Systems (GPS) so drivers will not be charged for driving outside state borders -- the tax is only meant to be applied for use of Oregon roads. Tracking cars' locations also could allow extra fees for traveling in congested traffic areas or during rush hours. Drivers also could be charged less if their car is more fuel-efficient, said James Whitty, manager of the Oregon Department of Transportation division that is overseeing the project.
A bigger, year-long test of 280 cars is scheduled to start in March 2006. After that, the state transportation department will make recommendations to the Legislature on whether to phase in the new-fangled tax statewide, possibly over 20 years to ease privacy concerns and spread out the costs of the new technology.
Elliott Eki, spokesman for the Oregon AAA, said the state absolutely needs to find a new source of money to build roads and bridges. But charging drivers more for driving in congested areas could force more people to use neighborhood streets to avoid extra fees.
Chris Hagerbaumer, a transportation specialist with the nonprofit Oregon Environmental Council, said the state should impose such a new tax slowly. "The issue is, if we make a flat switch, we would lose the incentives for people to purchase fuel-efficient cars," she said.
The mileage tax was the main recommendation of a 2001 state task force studying new ways to pay for road projects, which rely heavily on gasoline taxes. Those fees lost much of their purchasing power as the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s increased the costs of road projects. At the same time, carmakers began to slowly improve fuel efficiency, so that drivers were, in effect, paying less to use the roads, the task force found.
Oregon raised its gas taxes six times from 1981 to 1991 to keep highway funds flush, but politicians have been unable to muster the political will for any increases since then.
In the next decade, gas tax revenues in Oregon are projected to level off, then permanently decline as rising gas prices push consumers to drive less or buy more efficient hybrid electric or other alternatively fueled cars.
Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski (D) has said his state will become the 10th to adopt more stringent auto pollution standards than the federal government, standards likely to be achieved through greater fuel efficiency.
The number of hybrid vehicles in Oregon grew by 103 percent from 2003 to 2004, the second-highest percentage increase in the nation after New Jersey, according to R.L. Polk & Co., an automotive data-collection firm. The number of hybrids increased across the nation by 81 percent over the same period, the analysts found.
Send your comments on this story to: letters@stateline.org. Selected reader feedback will be posted in the Letters to the editor section.
Contact Eric Kelderman at: ekelderman@stateline.org
Just to ad to your story about waste, I remember the State of Oregon building a truck scale just south of Bend. Ten or 12 years later they tore it up and decided to build a new one but had to fight everyone because they didnt want it near them. They have since rebuilt the scale station at a much higher cost and it is only a short distance from the old one they tore down. Who pays for all this waste ?
Mindnumbinglyrubegoldbergesque complexity being one. (I did spell check, and yes, it is a word.)
I'm not unleashing squat. Give them NO more money. The attitude of "but this is a bit less of an *** raping than the alternative" is for losers.
"The attitude of "but this is a bit less of an *** raping than the alternative" is for losers."
...no, realists. In reality half of the gas tax money will be wasted - I know that, but half will be used for roads - and that is still a bargain.
The problem is when you cut off the funding people will scream, as they have here in Texas, and they will take ANYTHING, your objections not withstanding. And you will have the most oppressive, intrusive, and costly new tax ever devised (this mileage tax), shoved down your throat. And when you complain then...it will fall on deaf ears, just as it does here.
Sorry, Bob, but accepting the "lessor of two evils" is still accepting evil. What you say may well indeed come, but not due to all of us rolling over and simply allowing the bully to have his way.
As far as I'm concerned, a fight is never over, not as long as I'm still breathing. If all else fails, the Founding Fathers gave us an out against oppression and abuse from our government.
Members of the Political Parties as well as ordinary citizens need to realize we actually have 4 branches of government. Executive, Legislative, Judicial, and WE THE PEOPLE!!!! Politicians are our representatives, not our Lords.
So no, I won't just sit back and allow myself to be raped as a "lesser of two evils," not as long as I have a breath left in my body, freedom of speech, the right to campaign and vote and if all else fails, the Second Amendment.
This whole thing makes me feel better about buying a boat, frankly.
...you can lead a horse to water...:)
..but a pencil must be lead.
And drving all their crappy nit-wit liberals into Montana. Rasing the property taxes. Adding more people, crime, traffic and lights.
But we got an expresso hut on every corner now. /sarc
We'll have to change the abreviation of the State from MT. (empty) to (State full of liberal tree hugging, tofue eating, sandal wearing old hippys )
...................
They call it paradise
I don't know why
You call some place paradise - kiss it good-bye.
For posterity purposes, notice that this thread is largely a function of slaves arguing about how much their chains are going to cost them, not how and why they became slaves. If it is not possible for me as a private citizen to make illegal the natural right of travel, then it is not possible for any one or group of citizens to delegate authority for that to their agents in government. If people argue that cars are more dangerous than horses (already disproven in countless court cases of a previous age) and therefore there must be licensing, registration, and the payment of protection money to a private insurance industry, then they also must agree that an AR-15 is much more dangerous than a flintlock and therefore...
Big Government and a presumption of guilt before the fact is great as long as it accomodates the fear of the unknown. In this case the unknown is the freedom from being serialized and tracked like a farm animal by our own employees for exercising a natural right. The fear is that a citizen might have to protect himself from damage instead of the much more comfortable socialist approach of attempting to force everybody else to protect him. The unknown is demanding accountablility from the irresponsible and the enforcement of justice through the courts.
Freedom sucks doesn't it?
baaaaaaa baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Who wants freedom when they can have the warm fuzzy feeling of security?
Absolutely! Once they realize this, or some leftist in their Yugo start gripeing "it isn't fair, it isn't fair", then, a "fairer tax" will be enacted, to insure that all pay "their fair share". (sound familiar?)
PS, for anybody that thinks this tax will replace the fuel tax; I got some PRIME beachfront property West Virginia I'll sell you, or a bridge....
Can someone explain to me how one puts mileage on a novel?
London has also instituted a "London Congestion Charge", and the daily fee is going up from £5 to £8 on July 4th, 2005.
Here's a map of the current congestion zone:
Elsewhere: “In interviews with the Democrat-Herald and others, James Whitty, the ODOT official in charge of the project, tried to assure the public that that was not in the plans.”
Yes...indeed...and when the police asked for Tasers, Tasering pre-teens and the wheelchair bound wasn’t in the plans -either.
So anyone getting 20mpg or over gets taxed at a higher rate than per gallon.
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