If you dodged a pothole this morning on the way to the University, or had to hold your coffee cup because the roads were too bumpy to leave it in the cup holder without splashing, Tuesday’s failure of the fuel tax increase doesn’t necessarily mean those poor conditions will last forever.
City councilors billed Measure 20-132 as the savior for Eugene’s streets, but the tax was actually a smaller part of a plan to reduce the city’s $170 million backlog of road repair and maintenance. And currently a number of lobbyists and political action groups are working to create a legislative bill that would increase the statewide fuel tax by 14 cents per gallon, providing revenues that could offset the loss of the failed ballot measure.
However, the mood of Eugene’s voters needs to change for these other parts of the plan to survive as they all could be subject to a vote, and lately increased fees and taxes have proved unsuccessful when on a ballot.
City officials introduced the fuel tax to the city council as part of a plan to reduce the backlog. The plan consisted of multiple revenue-generating options that would raise the $16 million to $18 million annually that officials said they needed to chip away at the backlog.
However, the fuel tax increase only generated $2 million of that, and the biggest pieces have yet to be finalized.
One piece of the city’s plan comes in the form of a bond measure. The city would sell bonds to raise approximately $6 million annually to fund road repairs.
The only potential snag is that the measure could face a vote by residents because it would raise property taxes to repay the bonds.
“These are very similar to the two park bond measures the city has already passed twice…and is not the same as the downtown urban renewal bond measure” that recently failed, said Eric Jones, the Eugene Public Works affairs manager.
Another $6 million would be raised each year from a street utility fee, which is a similar to water or sewer fees.
The system is scheduled to be calculated on the number of parking spaces each residence or business has, according to Fred McVey, a rates analyst for the public works department.
The utility fee may suffer the same fate as the fuel tax however, as residents could force a referendum and put the issue on a ballot. This summer, as opposition mounted against the fuel tax, enough signatures were gathered to put the tax to a vote, and it ultimately was defeated.
Ron Tyree led the local opposition movement to defeat the measure but said the consequences may provide a bleak future for the funding of the city’s road repair and maintenance.
“Yes, I’m not happy about that, and I’m not proud of that. I’m willing to pay taxes to have roads repaired, but at the same time we tried to work with the city” and they were unresponsive, Tyree said.
However, he said the results of rejecting the measure create the chance for a better plan to be adopted – this time at a statewide level.
“We’ve very confident that the statewide fuel tax increase will move forward, and we will have a tax that is fair for everyone,” Tyree said.
For that tax to pass though, Republicans and Democrats in the legislature will have to agree for a change.
While a statewide gas tax increase may be a big goal, optimism is growing.
“The problem is that gas taxes are not really popular, and if they are on the ballot they usually fail,” said Paul Romain, one of the lobbyists for the statewide increase. “There is a lot of political negotiation that needs to go on, but that is all happening right now, and we’ll be ready when the legislature convenes in 2009.”
[email protected]