Traffic on Interstate 5 near Olympia. (Bill Lucia/Washington State Standard)
This article was first published by TVW.
Lawmakers are again debating a plan to establish a road usage charge for funding Washington state highways.
Supporters say the change would be more equitable for drivers and is necessary to replace declining fuel tax revenue. Opponents raise concerns about privacy, cost, and government control.
House Bill 1921 and its Senate companion bill would set a 2.6-cent-per-mile charge for drivers.
The charge would be collected at registration renewal, offset by the amount of fuel tax paid in the previous cycle.
The program would be phased in over several years based on vehicle type and fuel efficiency rating. The charge would become mandatory for hybrid and electric vehicles first, in July 2029.
By July 2035 the road usage charge would apply to all vehicles with a fuel efficiency rating of 20 or more miles per gallon.
Fuel tax revenue is devoted exclusively to roads, but transit advocates and transportation planning organizations have pushed for distributing some of the road usage charge revenue to public transportation.
Under the framework of HB 1921, all road usage charge revenue would go towards road maintenance, but vehicle owners would also owe a new transit assessment equal to 10% of the road usage charge due.
The lead sponsor is the chair of the House Transportation Committee, Democratic Rep. Jake Fey of Tacoma.
“I think it’s this coming biennium, we’re looking at about 5% less gas tax revenue than we had in the previous biennium and since 2018, that was our high point in gas tax revenue. So it’s almost in some respects late in the game to be talking about a new revenue source or a revenue source that would help bridge the loss of the gas tax,” said Fey on TVW The Impact. “If you pay the gas tax and you have a pretty inefficient vehicle, you could be paying as much as $33 per thousand miles. And if you have an efficient vehicle, you might be— you know, internal combustion— you might be paying $12 per thousand miles. So there’s an inequity in that as well.”
The road usage charge program outlined in the bill would not require a GPS-enabled device to participate.
“We went to a system that is entirely voluntary. People have been concerned about privacy and having a GPS in their cars. Eventually, they’ll have that as a choice, but this just allows people to be able to do something like photograph their miles each year and send it in and then the mileage would be calculated without intruding into where people have been,” said Fey.
Fey views the bleak transportation budget outlook as all the more reason to move forward with a road usage charge transition.
“This is the year to get started on because full implementation is a good eight, ten years from now and in the meantime we’re losing all that gas tax revenue. That is going to affect our ability to provide, in particular preservation and maintenance for our system,” said Fey.
The lead Republican on transportation policy issues in the state Senate disagrees.
Sen. Curtis King of Yakima does not believe a road usage charge is a viable solution to declining fuel tax revenue and he takes issue with the anticipated administration costs of running such a program.
“When they started out, they told us it was going to be somewhere between 10% to 14% to collect the tax,” said King. “Now they say, well, we probably think it’s going to be about 5%, to collect it. Well, it costs us a half a percent to collect the gas tax. So right off the bat, you have to raise 5% more revenue, just to break even.”
King is also concerned about potentially creating a framework that could be repurposed in the future to exert control over driver behavior to meet environmental or traffic management goals and he disapproves of the transit assessment.
“One of the things that I really don’t like about this bill is that 10% surcharge. The people that use transit ought to start paying for it. You, as a car owner, get to pay 2.6 cents a mile. And then on top of that, once we figured out how many miles you’ve gone or what your bill is for the year, we’re going to tack on 10% so somebody can ride the transit, so somebody can ride their bike, so somebody can go for a walk if they want to. There’s no correlation there,” said King.