State panel seeks ideas in Fresno on road priorities, gas tax alternatives

State and regional transportation leaders spent Wednesday afternoon in Fresno hearing people talk about the greatest needs for highway and road maintenance in the central San Joaquin Valley.

And on Friday, those leaders will be listening for ideas about how on the state, counties and cities are supposed to pay for those needs.

The California Transportation Commission is in Fresno for three days, discussing the deteriorating condition of local roads and state highways, examining short- and long-term transportation needs in the region, and exploring alternatives for a state gasoline tax that is falling short of covering the maintenance costs of California’s sprawling network of pavement.

“We have not invested adequately in our existing infrastructure in many years,” said Will Kempton, the commission’s executive director. “The gas tax that has been the backbone of transportation funding for several decades is now failing to meet the needs.”

He added that “surveys around the state show that the public has pretty firmly indicated that they want any new money invested in the system, maintaining what we already have. They want us to fix it first” before expanding or building new roads.

At Wednesday’s forum — the first of seven planned across the state — business leaders and others talked about the importance of quality roads to the ability to move the San Joaquin Valley’s abundance of agricultural products and manufactured goods to markets elsewhere in the state and around the world. “All of our economies are tied to the movement of freight to some degree,” said Kern County’s Ahron Kakimi, chairman of a collection of county planning directors from across the Valley.

An advisory committee of the commission is exploring ways of developing a pilot program for a new road charge that would ultimately replace gas taxes in California. Such a charge — the details of which have yet to be worked out — would essentially be a user fee charged to vehicle owners based on miles driven on roads or highways. That committee will meet Friday as it shapes what that charge could look like.

“It’s really to test this concept, to see if it might work for California,” said Commissioner James Madaffer of San Diego, who chairs the advisory committee. The goal is “to phase out the gasoline tax and replace it with something that makes sense for the long-term.”

Madaffer told The Bee editorial board earlier Wednesday that gasoline taxes charged for each gallon of fuel sold are incapable of keeping up with deteriorating roads and highways. Among the concerns: While there are more cars on the road, the average vehicle uses far less gasoline than in the past.

California has a fuel-efficiency goal of 54.5 miles per gallon for new cars sold in the state by 2025. That robust target, likely to be achieved with a rising number of gas-sipping hybrid cars and all-electric vehicles, is great for the environment.

For road maintenance, however, that growing fuel efficiency means that there is less money coming in through gasoline taxes for every vehicle-mile driven, which also adds to wear and tear on highways. Adding how much more it costs to build a freeway now than it did 30 or 40 years ago, Madaffer said, “you can see that we’re in a prescription for failure, even worse than we are today, when it comes to financing our road network.”

“When everybody got 10 miles to the gallon, a gas tax made sense because everybody paid the same,” Madaffer said. “I’ve been driving an electric vehicle for about two years. I pay zero (in gasoline taxes), so I’m part of the problem. People who drive fuel-efficient vehicles, hybrids, are part of the problem. But I also think they’re part of the solution.”

The key question, with about 33 million vehicles registered in the state, is how to accomplish it. Wednesday’s forum also revealed a lack of consensus, and a great deal of concern, over a road charge to replace the gas tax.

Tony Boren, executive director of the Fresno Council of Governments, and Fresno County Farm Bureau chief Ryan Jacobsen said they worry that a road charge based on miles driven would create a disproportionate burden in the Valley where drivers in outlying — and often lower-income — areas must drive farther to get to work or to take advantage of services in Fresno or other cities. Jacobsen described it as a potential “assault on rural areas” because “the more miles you drive, the more you’re going to pay.”

Kempton noted that rural residents who drive more miles already pay more because they’re paying gasoline taxes for each gallon of fuel they buy.

Businesses whose vehicles deliver goods or services also are wary about increases to the existing gasoline taxes, said Debbie Hunsaker, president of Fresno safety barricade company Alert-O-Lite and board member of the Fresno Chamber of Commerce. “Every time you raise the gas tax, it increases the price of the product,” she said. “How much more can businesses absorb?”

Hunsaker added that business owners like her might also be confounded by a miles-based road charge. “If a business relies on trucks on the road, how on earth do we price our product?” she asked.

The pilot program for a miles-based road charge is one prospective option for coming up with additional money for road repairs. Others, Kempton said, include increasing the gasoline tax or indexing it for automatic increases to keep up with inflation, raising vehicle registration fees, transportation bonds, road tolls, or restoring truck weight charges to transportation needs.

Other work shows that people are interested not just in single mechanism for funding, but package of solutions.

But it is the miles-based charge that seems to be gaining the most traction in Sacramento as a long-term replacement for the gas tax.

Yet to be determined as Madaffer’s committee does its work are whether a road charge will rely on technology, maybe in the form of electronic transponders that measure how many miles a vehicle is driven (similar to electronic “fast-track” technology for toll bridges or highways). A charge could also be a flat annual fee based on a yearly average of miles driven, or passes or credits for miles that could be purchased and would need to be topped off periodically. Whatever form it takes, he added, “privacy will be a primary concern” for drivers.

This story was originally published May 27, 2015 at 6:45 PM with the headline "State panel seeks ideas in Fresno on road priorities, gas tax alternatives."