Gas tax vote may help.

Byline: The Register-Guard

In the 1980s and 1990s, gasoline tax increases in Oregon and Pat Paulsen's presidential campaigns had similar track records at the polls - they lost. For that reason, Eugene City Council members who supported an increase in the city's gas tax have cause to be disappointed by a judge's decision that opponents have succeeded in qualifying a gas tax rollback for a public vote. Yet councilors should resist the temptation to appeal the ruling or simply repeal the tax. The council should not fear hearing from the voters, and some good will come from a wider discussion of the options for funding transportation in Eugene and beyond.

The council voted in May to add 3 cents to Eugene's current 5-cent-per-gallon gas tax, already the state's highest. Fearing that an 8-cent tax would induce customers to buy fuel elsewhere, Eugene gas station owners, aided by the Oregon Petroleum Association, circulated petitions seeking a vote on a proposal to reduce Eugene's gas tax to Springfield's level of 3 cents per gallon.

Initially, the referendum drive appeared to have fallen short of the required number of signatures - 10 percent of votes cast for "all candidates for mayor" in the most recent election. In 2004, a total of 63,652 votes were cast in the mayoral race, and the gas tax petitions had fewer than 6,365 valid signatures. They did, however, meet the threshold if nearly 10,000 write-in votes aren't counted. On Friday, Lane County Circuit Judge Gregory Foote ruled that write-ins should be excluded.

The result is an insult to the principle that a write-in vote should count the same as any other. Yet the logic of Foote's decision is powerful enough to support an unwelcome conclusion. It's impossible to say how many of the write-in votes in 2004 were cast for legitimate candidates, Foote noted. The city code specifically bases the petition threshold on the number of votes for candidates, not the number of votes cast, and many write-ins could have been for people or characters who were not candidates in any sense of the word. The ambiguous wording in the city code should be changed to ensure that all votes are treated equally for all purposes.

Beyond the technicalities of the petition process, the gas station owners have good arguments for putting Eugene's tax to a vote. Eugene is already out in front of the rest of the state in terms of local gasoline taxes. In moving even farther ahead, the City Council should hope for broad public support. A vote will be a sure way of determining whether such support exists.

It's possible that most Eugene voters, like their statewide counterparts in the past, will take any chance they get to shave a few cents off the price they pay for gas. But the rollback will need to be presented in context. The Oregon Petroleum Association does not oppose gas taxes in general - just one that puts its Eugene members at a competitive disadvantage. During this year's legislative session, the association supported an increase in the state gasoline tax. The revenue would have been shared with city and county governments.

A statewide tax would be preferable to the emerging patchwork of local transportation taxes. But Oregon's gas tax has not been increased since 1993. Local governments have been forced to choose between acting to protect their own streets or standing by while their maintenance backlogs grow. Of all the various alternatives for raising transportation funds, the gas tax is the most straightforward and easiest to collect.

Ideally, Eugene would not have a gas tax that is noticeably higher than in neighboring jurisdictions. The council's support for such a tax, however, is a response to a failure at the state level, as even opponents of Eugene's tax acknowledge. Under those circumstances, a gas tax becomes the best of several bad alternatives. If the referendum campaign helps clarify Eugene voters' understanding of the hard transportation choices before them, a public vote will serve a useful purpose.