Red light for road taxes.

Byline: The Register-Guard

A committee of the Eugene City Council has approved five - five! - taxes that the full council might adopt to pay for road repairs. The council needs to step back and figure out why its road repair needs have become a bottomless pit.

Councilor Alan Zelenka, a member of the committee, articulated the conventional argument for higher road taxes: "If we don't solve the problem now, it just gets worse." Trouble is, it seems to get worse no matter what the council does.

Eugene already has a gas tax of 5 cents per gallon. The committee recommended raising that to 8 cents. The committee also forwarded to the council proposals for a 5 percent surcharge on garbage bills, a fee for street lighting and bike paths, a charge based on the number of parking spaces at homes and businesses and a 10-year property tax levy of 38 cents per $1,000 of assessed value.

Taken together, the taxes would raise $16 million a year. That would allow the city to cover a $2 million shortfall in its annual street maintenance budget, and get started on a backlog of street repair projects now estimated to total $170 million.

Sixteen million might not be enough. Five years ago, Eugene's streets needed an estimated $67 million in repairs, and the City Council responded by adopting a 3-cent gas tax. Two years ago, the backlog had grown to $93 million, and the council bumped the gas tax to 5 cents. Last year the backlog passed the $100 million mark. Now it's $170 million, growing so fast that new taxes would barely slow it down.

Each of the committee's proposals has problems:

At 8 cents per gallon, Eugene would have the highest municipal gas tax in Oregon.

A tax on garbage collection makes sense only if the idea is to recover the cost of damage caused to city streets by haulers' trucks - in which case it makes more sense to tax trucks by weight than to impose a tax that would discourage people from having their trash collected.

A tax on parking would eventually reduce the number of spaces, resulting in more on-street parking and in people having to drive farther to find a place to park.

A property tax increase would consume a portion of local governments' limited capacity to raise property taxes for other purposes, and push Eugene's already-high property taxes still higher.

No one knows exactly how a fee for street lighting and bike paths would be collected, so not much can be said about it except to note that fees are proliferating already.

Beyond the details of the tax proposals lies a larger question: Why aren't other local governments in Lane County and Oregon preparing to turn the key on six-piston road taxes? Paying for street maintenance and repair is a huge burden for everyone - yet Eugene seems uniquely ambitious in its response to the problem. Before adopting the committee's recommendations, the council might consider pausing to see how other cities manage to keep their streets passable without passing taxes by the basketload.

Looking to other jurisdictions could be helpful for another reason. Lane County and all of its cities have trouble paying for their road networks, and their problems may soon be getting worse. The county is in grave danger of losing the $20 million a year in road funds it receives from the federal Secure Rural Schools Act, and even if the payments are renewed, the funds may no longer be shared with cities. A countywide road funding crisis is just around the corner, suggesting a need for a countywide solution.

Maintaining roads is a basic obligation of local government. Eugene is right to take this obligation seriously. With the committee's proposals, however, the city risks racing far ahead of its neighbors. If other local governments face similar challenges, they should be enlisted in a collective response - and if they don't, they might offer helpful ideas for maintaining roads without a battery of new taxes.