A special transportation committee gingerly stepped closer to proposing a tax on the miles a vehicle travels -- an odometer tax, you might say.
A subcommittee of the 21st Century Transportation Committee agreed this morning to have the full committee vote on a vehicle miles tax as one of several recommendations for raising transportation money. The committee is charged with finding new ways to pay for the state's growing road and travel needs as current revenue sources flatline or drop. The committee's vote this afternoon is expected to send the package of proposals to the legislature.
The vehicle miles tax likely will promote the most contentious debate, as it would charge car and truck owners based on their odometer readings at annual inspections.
Several subcommittee members, including legislators, questioned aspects of the tax that led to softening the language. The proposal will now say that the legislature should consider finding a replacement for the gas tax and consider the vehicle miles tax as an alternative without specifying a rate.
The material presented at the meeting, though, offered an example of a 1/4-cent or 1/2-cent per mile tax. That would cost a car owner $25 or $50 respectively for 10,000 miles of travel. Drivers on average put about 12,000 miles on a car per year, according to federal data.
Other proposals included raising the highway use tax charged on car sales, increasing registration fees, tolls on I-95 and I-77 and bonds.




Re: Vehicle miles tax idea advances
Here is one for you....
Say I travel out of state. While driving my vehicle I end up putting on some 2-3000 more miles while out of state. Now I have to pay my state for the miles I drove in another state? How does that work?
Ok second theory here....
How will they do this? Read the odometer and implement a new database or an area in an existing database? Hello wouldn't that take funding to make and test? Even adding a simple little box would take money to program, money to implement across the state at the various inspection sites, money to pay the testers, and money to upkeep the servers it would need to be housed on. I mean come on now. Why spend more money to make less? Ok what about devices? You know to make sure the people don't just roll back the odometer a few hundred miles to save a few bucks. Would everyone have to go purchase these or would the state provide them? Ooops more money spent by either the consumer (which would probably get taxed at the shop selling the device too), or the government. Ooops what if it breaks?
I realize the government does some things backwards, take the way they name things, but this is going a bit far. How can yet another burden of taxes fly to the consumer? Aren't we taxed enough? Food, drinks, products, gas, state, federal? I came from Ohio we had local taxes too. Instead of hairbrain ideas how about something like a simple local tax, you know the one by the cities? Every city had their tax rates usually around 2%, this helped to offset stupid hairbrained ideas such as this one. Tax on gas is low and some cities even put no tax on beverages. Overall cities were able to overcome problems such as this!