AUTO FEE BOOST URGED IN STATE 3-YEAR BOOST AIMED AT EASING DEFICIT.

Byline: David M. Drucker Staff Writer

San Francisco Assemblywoman wants California motorists to help ease the state's $17.5 billion budget deficit by tripling Vehicle License Fees for the next two years.

Under her Assembly Bill 1753, Democrat Carole Migden said the legislature would raise the $9 billion that the state owes local governments, sparing the beleaguered state budget from shouldering an additional burden.

``When the state Legislature enacted the VLF rebates, we were giving back (to the local governments) surpluses that we had,'' said Alan LoFaso, Migden's chief of staff. ``But now we have a deficit.''

LoFaso blamed the state's current budget crisis on a 1998 law that slashed the annual car registration fee vehicle owners pay by two-thirds.

California collects vehicle registration fees from vehicle-owners and distributes a share of the revenue to each city and county, known as VLF backfill payments.

When the state passed a law in 1998 cutting registration fees, it agreed to maintain the old level of funding by paying local governments the difference out of the general fund.

But Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, author of the law that reduced vehicle licensing, said blaming his legislation for the state's budget deficit is ridiculous.

``The state is having a problem with its spending. Spending has grown 36 percent (in the last three years) while the population has grown 5 percent,'' McClintock said.

Now a candidate for controller, McClintock said any effort to raise vehicle registration fees will ``breathe new life'' into his desire to abolish them, and added that prior to his law ``the car tax was the most abusive and outdated tax on Californians, and not a penny of it went to our roads.''

The bill has yet to receive a committee hearing.