California’s gas tax revenue, the primary source of money to fix state and local roads, is dwindling as residents switch to electric cars. The California Legislature is paralyzed to replace this revenue with something more sustainable.
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Relying on a gasoline tax to maintain California’s roads could make a lot of sense in the decades ahead.
All we will need to do is get rid of those pesky electric vehicles and force everyone back behind the wheel of something that belches smog and pays those gasoline taxes.
Of course, it is the official policy of the state to go in precisely the opposite direction and ween ourselves off of gasoline. Despite our president’s dismissal of climate change, California’s official goal is to phase out the sale of vehicles and light trucks with spark plugs and carburetors by 2035.
What’s good for climate change, in this instance, is horrible for our transportation system.
Phasing out gasoline means phasing out the traditional source of tax money that funds everything from road rehabilitation to public transit.
This is an utterly fixable problem in Sacramento if lawmakers phased in some new tax or fee to compensate for the gasoline tax revenue as Californians transition toward electrical vehicles.
But California Democrats who control both houses of the Legislature and the governor’s office lack the leadership to do the obvious because they are running scared.
Democrats are so trapped in their own faux rhetoric about affordability, nobody wants to do anything that looks like a new tax, even when an old one is decreasing and something needs to be done to supplement it.
Beware when Sacramento only studies a problem
The glaring case in point is a bill that would merely study this problem, but has the Capitol all in a lather.
Senate Bill 1421 by Lori Wilson, D-Suisun City, is the most modest of steps in the right direction. SB 1421 would require a new commission within the California Transportation Agency to report back to the Legislature by 2027 on ways to implement “a road user charge or a mileage-based fee system.”
The existing gasoline tax is a crude form of a mileage-based taxation system. Californians with long commutes (or gas-guzzling cars) pay a disproportionate share of the gas tax. Many marathon commuters do so out of fiscal necessity, with housing too expensive closer to the job. The existing system is rife with inequities.
Yet adding a mileage-based assessment onto, say, the annual vehicle registration fee is a tried-and-true political disaster.
Long-time Californians will fondly remember when then-Gov. Gray Davis tripled vehicle registration fees back in 2003 as a controversial budget move. It didn’t help that electricity costs were also skyrocketing at the time as part of a legislature-directed transition toward a more competitive generation market.
Davis did not survive the year as governor, recalled and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It’s no surprise that Gov. Gavin Newsom, our profile in courage, is already on record against any kind of mileage-based surcharge. No solution here, even if it is the right thing to do, is going to be wildly popular.
The inaction in Sacramento means that electric vehicle owners are enjoying the benefits of what is essentially for them a tax decrease as they avoid gasoline purchases altogether. The independent California Legislative Analyst’s Office predicts a decrease in gas revenues of as much as $5 billion within nine years.
This tax cut has huge implications, however, on a treasured government service – filling a pothole. In Sacramento County, for example, local governments rely on this state revenue as a primary source of funding for road maintenance. Roads in the unincorporated county are already rated poor and getting worse. Voters are in no mood to dig into their own pockets to fix what they see as a priority for their elected officials with a new sales tax on them.
Republicans have Democrats on the run
The Republicans in the Legislature currently have the Democrats on the run with their outrage over bills like Wilson’s and any talk of a new tax or fee to stop the financial bleeding from the dwindling gasoline tax revenues. But they represent communities with crumbling road systems without the financial wherewithal to fix them, and some Republicans are beginning to speak up.
“It’s caught up in political drama and these guys are afraid of their political lives in the future, and so they succumb to all this pressure,” said Robert Poythress, a Madera County supervisor who happens to be a Republican, in a recent article in Cal-Matters.
“Democrats could move forward quickly, (but) I think that they are scared to death themselves and just don’t have the political backbone,” Poythress said.
Democrats are actually going backwards in any real affordability agenda here. Watching our road systems decay, and then paying to fix this problem years later, will just cost Californians more money in the end.
It’s not like California hasn’t already studied ways to replace the disappearing gasoline tax revenues. Bills to study something in the Legislature are usually an indication that there’s simply no will to take the tough vote and address the problem.
That pretty much sums up the Democrats leading us in Sacramento right now. The political punting exercise that is SB 1421 proves the point.
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Tom Philp is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist who returned to The Sacramento Bee in 2023 after working in government for 16 years. Philp had previously written for The Bee from 1991 to 2007. He is a native Californian and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.