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Task Force Seeks New Revenue System for Roads
After more than a year of work, several meetings and much research, Oregon’s Road User Fee Task Force is getting what it needed thanks to recent media interest – public discussion about a new revenue system for our roads. Unfortunately, many of the media reports and editorials over the past few weeks are based on inaccurate and incomplete information.
What is the Road User Fee Task Force doing? The task force is examining replacements for the gas tax. It is not proposing a new tax on top of the gas tax, nor is it proposing to implement any new system in the 2003 Oregon Legislative Assembly.
The Oregon Legislature created the Road User Fee Task Force to design a new revenue system to ultimately replace the fuel tax on gasoline. With highly fuel-efficient vehicle propulsion systems entering the marketplace, such as hybrid electric engines, the legislature became concerned that gas tax revenues will flatten and drop by the end of the decade.
Less road revenue means a weakened road system. Since transportation is the backbone of our economy and way of life, the legislature wanted to know what should be done to resolve this emerging concern.
The Road User Fee Task Force examined more than 25 options for a new revenue system and decided the gas tax ought to be replaced with a true user fee. The thought was, "If you use it, you ought to pay for it."
The gas tax used to operate like a user fee. Back in 1960, nearly all vehicles achieved the same approximate gas mileage, about eight to ten miles per gallon. If a person drove more, they paid more for the additional burden placed on the road system.
With the coming of more fuel-efficient vehicles after 1975, things changed. Some drivers began to pay much less than their fair share for their use of the roads. Road revenues began to flatten and the legislature turned to the gas tax to make up for the loss. Legislative enactment of gas tax increases ended twelve years ago.
The future outlook follows the same trend. Vehicle fuel efficiency increased from an average of 11.8 miles per gallon in 1970 to nearly 20 today. Fuel-efficient vehicles now entering the marketplace will further increase the average miles per gallon. While beneficial from an environmental and energy conservation perspective, it severely hampers the ability to fund the maintenance, preservation and modernization of our roads.
The Road User Fee Task Force believes the best user fee is based on the amount of mileage driven. This makes sense. The more one drives, the more one demands of the road system. With more people driving more miles, more choke points develop in the road system that need smoothing out, and more maintenance of the roads is required.
The way a mileage fee would work is every passenger vehicle in Oregon would be equipped with an electronic means to calculate miles driven over specific time periods. A device would transmit the number of miles driven since the last reading to a reader at a central location or a service station. A fee rate of between 1.25 and 1.5 cents per mile would be charged as part of the gasoline fill up payment or in a monthly bill.
Early on the task force decided that it did not want Oregonians to pay fees for miles driven out of state. This led to researching electronic means of calculating miles driven.
Some people have expressed concern about the potential use of one particular device with the ability to calculate mileage, the Global Positioning System, and condemned the whole concept out of a legitimate concern for privacy.
While this concern is understandable, it is misplaced. Any GPS device used would be a simple version manufactured to calculate and record mileage data and send information no more than a few feet – from a vehicle to a reader at a fuel pump, for example. It would not record vehicle location data or transmit to a wider area. The task force is certainly not recommending the state of Oregon track the whereabouts of individual motorists.
Furthermore, at this point the task force has not settled on any particular device to gather the mileage data. GPS devices will not be recommended if privacy concerns are not able to be resolved. Fortunately, other options exist for electronic calculation of mileage, such as an odometer sensor tag.
As required by law, ODOT is undertaking a pilot test of the task force recommendations. The pilot test will take approximately three years.
The Road User Fee Task Force is charged with looking into the future to address anticipated problems ahead of time. This will involve many stops, starts and revisits of challenging but intriguing concepts. The worst thing that could happen is that this process would occur without public discourse. The recent media attention has done the great good of raising the issue. The Road User Fee Task Force welcomes all Oregonians to join in our deliberations.
James M. Whitty
Administrator
Road User Fee Task Force
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