Road-fee rage misdirected.

Byline: The Register-Guard

No one is going to like paying the new transportation fee approved Tuesday by city councils in Eugene and Springfield. But they'd be even unhappier paying the long-term cost of allowing city streets to go to blazes, and that's what's happening. The city councils made a hard choice in response to an abdication of responsibility by the state, and to a lesser extent by the county.

Lane County Commissioners Bill Dwyer and Bobby Green are considering collecting signatures to refer the cities' transportation fees to a public vote. The result of such a vote would be easy to predict: The fees would be roundly rejected. But the leaders of a move to scrap the fees should not be hailed as taxpayers' heroes unless they go beyond undoing the councils' work, and come up with a better way to pay for city roads.

For nearly a century, Oregon's roads, highways and bridges have been financed by those who use them - primarily through taxes on gasoline, supplemented by vehicle registration fees. Income from these sources is shared with local governments. Counties also receive road funds from the sale of federal timber, and Lane County shares some of these funds with cities. But cities have no sources of transportation funds of their own, and depend on the state and counties for road money.

Oregon's gas tax hasn't been increased in a decade, and counties' timber revenues have been sharply reduced. Because of stagnant or declining transportation funds, Eugene now faces a $67 million backlog of street repairs, according to the Lane Council of Governments - city officials' estimate is even higher. Springfield is spending $1 million more on road work than it receives each year from the county and state, and will exhaust its road fund reserves by the middle of next year.

City councilors in Eugene and Springfield faced a choice between allowing streets to deteriorate to a point at which they would eventually need costly reconstruction, or finding their own resources to pay for road repairs. The second option is by far the most politically difficult, but it is also the most responsible. Both councils voted to charge residents and businesses monthly fees for road repairs, and in January are likely to adopt 3-cent-per-gallon city gas taxes.

The transportation maintenance fee is a novel means of financing street repairs. Businesses that generate a lot of traffic will pay the most, but everyone will pay something - the theory being that everyone derives some benefit from city streets. Even people who don't drive, for instance, depend on firetrucks, postal delivery vehicles and grocery distributors, all of whom need good transportation systems.

Lane County officials can't claim to have been blindsided by the cities' action. County commissioners met in October with City Council members from throughout Lane County to discuss the transportation funding problems they have in common. The cities' plans could have been sidetracked by a countywide gas tax, a vehicle registration fee or both. But no concrete proposals emerged from that meeting - and county officials certainly made no commitment to help cities raise money for road repairs.

Green says a better approach would have been for the Legislature to approve a statewide gas tax increase, and apportion some of the revenue to cities and counties. He's right - but what the Legislature ought to do and what it will do are two different things. The only transportation funding to come out of Salem in the past decade has been in the form of bonds. There's no evidence that the 2003 Legislature will approve a pay-as-you-go transportation maintenance plan. Indeed, the Eugene and Springfield councils acted last week partly out of fear that the Legislature would pre-empt local governments' authority to adopt their own taxes for road repairs.

A statewide approach to transportation funding has served Oregon well in the past - it allows for coordinated planning and avoids local differences in the level of transportation taxes. A countywide approach is next best. But officials in Eugene and Springfield have refused to watch their roads crumble while those with more direct responsibility for transportation funding do nothing. To their credit, the two cities' councils have succeeded in cooperating on a plan that closely resembles a regional approach. The plan isn't popular, but it shows political courage that is lacking in other jurisdictions.