Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Gas tax hike urged

CARSON CITY -- Nevada's highway builders want the state's gasoline tax raised so more highways can be constructed.

"It's time to consider either increasing the gas tax or indexing the gas tax" to inflation, said Pamela Miller, a spokeswoman for Associated General Contractors of Nevada.

Miller told a legislative committee looking into spending on highway construction Monday that, "We need to build more roads."

Her testimony came after state Transportation Director Tom Stephens said Nevada needs $6.1 billion over the next 10 years for new projects and to preserve the current 5,500 miles of highway statewide. But he said there's only $4.2 billion anticipated.

Nevada's gasoline tax, including state and local levies, in the major counties of Clark and Washoe and Carson City plus three rural counties stands at 33.7 cents a gallon. In addition, the federal tax is 18.3 cents a gallon.

Miller told the committee, which held its meeting in Las Vegas and was televised to Carson City, that her organization helped push through the last gasoline tax increases, 2.5 cents in October 1991 and another 2.5 cents in October 1992.

Highway building in Nevada is financed from federal funds and highway user taxes and fees. Miller said her organization is concerned that some of the highway user tax is going for other purposes.

Every year, $27 million goes out of the highway fund for such things as paying for the state Department of Motor Vehicles and Public Safety and for the Transportation Department to buy equipment when private contractors should be doing the work. This money needs to be returned to build roads, she said.

Michael Lynch of the Associated Contractors of Northern Nevada said a 1993 study in Washoe County showed there would be a $660 million shortfall over 20 years in building and maintaining roads.

"If you index the fuel tax with inflation, that would alleviate the shortfall," he said.

But Lynch said he was not pushing an increase in the gasoline tax.

The study committee, headed by Assemblyman Roy Neighbors, D-Tonopah, received a briefing from Stephens and other department officials on how road-building priorities are decided.

John Price, division administrator for Nevada of the Federal Highway Administration, dispelled the myth the state is getting shortchanged when it sends its federal highway gas taxes to Washington, D.C.

From 1956 to 1996, Price said, the state received $1.56 back for every $1 in federal gasoline taxes collected. But he said in 1996 the state got back only 95 cents on each $1 collected.

Some states, he said, receive only 74 cents out of every dollar back. Those are mostly in the Southeast. Western states, he said, make out pretty good.

Sen. Lawrence Jacobsen, R-Minden, said a temporary high-level nuclear waste dump may be located in Southern Nevada and he wanted to know whether the highway administration would allocate any special funds.

Price replied, "We don't have any role in that except to designate the routes" over which the nuclear waste would be hauled. Any extra money would have to be approved by Congress, he said.

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