Officials decide timing wrong to hike car fees.

Byline: RANDI BJORNSTAD The Register-Guard

Levying a countywide tax on gasoline and upping registration fees on locally owned motor vehicles may be a good idea someday, but it's one whose time has not quite come, two dozen local government officials concluded after two hours of discussion on Wednesday evening.

They also concluded that it's not a direction they would feel comfortable going without voter approval, but didn't rule out sending a measure to voters in the future.

"Right now, (Lane County) has six bond measures in front of the voters that will raise their taxes for a variety of projects, property tax bills are just hitting people's mailboxes, there will be a measure before voters in January that could result in reducing social services and people also will begin filing their personal income taxes about that same time," Lane County Commissioner Bobby Green said. "I think timing is important, and I think this is not the right time to be asking people to vote on even more taxes."

Most of the mayors, city councilors and his fellow county commissioners seemed to agree with Green, sending the concept of a local gas tax and extra motor vehicle registration fee back to the staff at the Lane Council of Governments for more work.

Their concerns varied. Coburg City Administrator Mike Hudson said he had no qualms about the concept of asking voters to raise funds for road maintenance through driving-related taxes.

"But Coburg has an issue with the way the idea has been presented, to distribute that tax money on the basis of population," Hudson said. "That doesn't seem equitable. We have a tremendous volume of traffic on our roads - we're just inundated - so we would be generating massive amounts of gasoline tax that would end up going elsewhere in the county because we're such a small city in terms of population. We still wouldn't have anywhere near the money we need to maintain our heavily used roads. We need to have a way of equalizing that imbalance."

Lane County Commissioner Bill Dwyer said he would have a hard time supporting a countywide approach such as a fuel tax or motor vehicle registration fee at the same time that cities such as Eugene and Springfield have been talking about imposing new taxes called "transportation utility fees" on city residents and businesses through their utility bills.

"A lot of people are getting their utilities cut off right now because they can't pay those bills," Dwyer said. "Personally, I'd be willing to look at a gasoline tax or registration fee to fix roads, but not if cities are also insisting on regressive fees that tax mom and pop on their utility bills."

No matter how it gets divided, the money raised by locally generated gas and registration taxes still wouldn't meet the needs of local governments for refurbishing badly deteriorating roads, the officials agreed.

A 1-cent-per-gallon tax would raise about $1 million to be shared by the county and all the cities within it, proportionally more if voters approved larger taxes, say 2 cents or 5 cents per gallon.

A $5 vehicle registration fee would bring in about $1.7 million annually, although with voter concurrence the fee could be set much higher - as much as $15 per vehicle.

Cities face a variety of road-maintenance problems, ranging from $90 million worth of deferred street maintenance in Eugene to Oakridge's need to replace a street system originally built simply by laying asphalt over a mud base. A few places, including Florence, reported their street systems still to be in good condition but in future danger because of rapidly dwindling maintenance funds.

Many at Wednesday's meeting faulted the state Legislature for putting local governments into a budget predicament that leaves insufficient funding for roads, schools and other necessary expenditures. But they also rejected the idea that local areas could wait for the state to solve the problem.

"I would rather we would take control of our own destiny," Dwyer said. "We can't rely on the state to be manna from heaven - it never has been, and it never will be."