HELENA – A Missoula lawmaker has introduced a bill to raise the state’s tax on gasoline by a nickel a gallon, dividing the proceeds between local streets and roads and public transportation.
Rep. Nancy Wilson, D-Missoula, is the sponsor of House Bill 275. The bill, introduced Thursday, will be heard by the House Transportation Committee next Wednesday.
It would be the first increase in the state tax on gasoline since 1994, Wilson said. It would not raise the current tax on diesel fuel.
The current Montana tax on gasoline is 27 cents per gallon, while the federal tax adds 18.4 cents per gallon.
Wilson’s bill would raise millions of dollars a year, but Wilson had not yet received an official estimate.
“It’s substantial,” she said.
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A similar bill sponsored by Wilson in 2013, but which died in committee, would have raised the gas tax by two cents and generated $9.8 million a year in revenue. If those same assumptions hold, a back-of-the-envelope estimate is that her 2015 version could raise about $25 million a year.
None of the money generated by the gas-tax increase would go for repair or building of state highways.
“State highways are relatively well-funded,” Wilson said. “Local roads and streets don’t do as well.”
Wilson’s bill would allocate the 5-cent addition to the gas tax as follows:
• Three cents, or 60 percent of the total, would be targeted for additional funding for the repair and maintenance of county roads and city streets under certain funding formulas.
• Two cents, or 40 percent, would go public transportation. Of that total, 35 percent would for matching funds for federal programs to provide public transportation to nonurbanized areas, 35 percent to match federal programs to provide public transportation in urbanized areas, 20 percent would go to match federal funds to provide additional bus routes between cities and 10 percent to DUI task forces.
The DUI task forces, for example, could use the money to set up programs to transport people back from downtowns at nights.
Wilson said she worked for the University of Montana Office of Transportation and helped set up a similar bus system that, among its accomplishments, provided transportation in the evening and early morning hours. It helped prevent people from getting drunken-driving tickets and accidents.
“If you offer people a choice, they’ll take it,” Wilson said.
The legislator said she was encouraged that her bill was assigned to the House Transportation Committee this year instead of the Taxation Committee where it died two years ago.