Different town, same issues: Junction City needs money for street repairs.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Different town, same issues: Junction City needs money for street repairs. City officials reluctantly conclude that a municipal gasoline tax offers the best source of funds, but gas dealers fear losing customers to out-of-town stations.

Every city in Lane County is confronting these same problems, which points to an obvious solution: a uniform, countywide gas tax.

In Junction City, the City Council voted Tuesday to adopt a gas tax of 5 cents per gallon, effective Nov. 1. Junction City thereby joins Coburg, Cottage Grove, Creswell, Eugene, Florence, Oakridge, Springfield and Veneta in levying or preparing to levy taxes on fuel for street repairs. That leaves Dunes City and Westfir as the only Lane County cities without an adopted or proposed gas tax.

Lane County is partly the cause of the cities' need for additional street-repair funds. For two decades, the county has shared money from its road fund with cities. In exchange, the cities agreed to maintain streets and provide other services that formerly had been the responsibility of the county.

Lane County's ability to continue this form of revenue-sharing is in grave doubt. The federal timber money that once fed the county road fund dwindled as the harvest of timber from federal lands declined. Congress substituted direct payments to the counties for timber revenues, but these payments may not be renewed. This threat comes at a time when local governments' share of the state gas tax, which hasn't been raised since 1993, has stagnated. Meanwhile, the cost of labor, materials and everything else connected to street maintenance keeps rising.

Members of the Junction City council confronted the same dilemma as their colleagues in other cities: Find more money for streets, or do nothing. Doing nothing means allowing streets to deteriorate to such an extent that even more costly repairs will be needed in future years. Finding more money means imposing some form of tax - and the gas tax is both easy to collect and closely related to its purpose. City councilors throughout Lane County deserve credit for facing the consequences of inaction and taking the unpopular step of taxing gasoline sales.

The same credit can't be given to members of the Lane County Board of Commissioners. They, too, confront a widening gap between road repair needs and the ability to pay for them, but they haven't acted.

It's understandable that the board is gun-shy about raising taxes of any kind, having been repeatedly thwarted in its efforts to obtain increased revenues for public safety and other services. But the commissioners have an opportunity to address the shortfall in the county's road fund, while also correcting a problem caused by the emerging patchwork of local gas taxes. The problem is that gas station owners in most Lane County cities must charge their customers 3 cents to 5 cents more per gallon than their competitors whose stations are in unincorporated areas.

The disparity is most severe in Eugene, where the gas tax is high and may go higher, and where gas stations outside the city's jurisdiction are relatively easy to find. But the price gap affects all cities with gas taxes to some extent. The price disparity, and not the tax itself, is what led Eugene gas station owners to enlist the aid of the Oregon Petroleum Association in seeking to equalize Eugene and Springfield gas taxes.

A countywide gas tax would eliminate the disparities. The proceeds from such a tax could be shared based on the sales of gasoline in each jurisdiction.

With Junction City's action, city councils representing more than 70 percent of Lane County's population have voted in favor of gas taxes. The county commissioners are not doing those constituents a favor by permitting tax-related gas price disparities to continue. Meanwhile, 100 percent of Lane County's population relies on a county road network that is subject to the same financial pressures that have led city councils to act. It may be too late for the county commissioners to lead on this issue, but it's not too late for them to follow.