A task force that studied Ohio's transportation needs said that a mileage tax has the potential to raise revenue and that [image-nocss] the state should look into the idea. "Most people on the task force agreed that we need to invest more in our infrastructure, but if you want to do that, how do you raise funds in a fair and equitable way?" David Beach, who was on the state panel, told the newspaper. "With new technology, it becomes feasible to have different ways to collect taxes."
The task force's main recommendation for increasing revenue is to raise Ohio's current 28-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax by 13 cents to pay for roads, bridges and transportation, said the report. But Governor Ted Strickland has said he would not support a tax increase.
Bonnie Teeuwen, deputy director of the Ohio Department of Transportation district that includes Cuyahoga County, told the paper that she has volunteered the district to try out a mileage tax.
And transportation officials for the federal government and more than two dozen states, including Ohio, have contacted Oregon's Department of Transportation, considered the leader in mileage tax issues.
According to the Plain Dealer, the Oregon Transportation Department and Oregon State University tested a Road User Fee in a pilot project in 2006. A dashboard display, a GPS receiver and antenna, a mileage counter unit and a short-range-radio-frequency antenna were placed in 285 vehicles. The counter tallied miles a person drove in the state.
Two Portland gas stations were equipped with mileage-reading devices. So when a driver pulled up to the gasoline pump, a radio wave transmitted information from the car to the pump, which sent that information to a computer in the station office. The driver's receipt from the pump showed the gasoline tax was removed and the mileage tax added. The driver paid the amount due.
Under the pilot program, drivers were charged 1.2 cents a mile, which was considered equivalent to the state's 24-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax rate. That amount could be higher to raise more revenue. There could be an additional cost to people who drive less fuel-efficient cars, like SUVs.
"For the consumer it was seamless. It was exactly the same as pulling up to the pump and getting a receipt that had the mileage fee and the gas tax fee, with the deduction of the gas tax fee," Shelly Snow, spokesperson for the Oregon Transportation Department, which has studied the mileage tax since 2001, told the paper.
Oregon's project, which received $2.1 million from the Federal Highway Administration and $770,000 from the state, ended in 2007, but officials decided further study was warranted. Gov. Ted Kulongoski included a proposal in the new state budget to fund a program to look into how a mileage tax could be added, Snow said. "We found the concept was feasible but there are several key things that would have to be done or researched further before anything like this could be put into practice," she said.
Imposing the tax through gas stations worked, said the report, but the cost would be too high to retrofit all vehicles with the equipment, said Snow. The gear could be put in new vehicles by manufacturers. "That's one of the reasons this concept is still years down the road," she said.
Another obstacle is how to gather the information and collect the mileage fee at a minimal cost to the state and without causing headaches for motorists, such as filling out paperwork, the report said.
Beach added, "The problem with both a volume-based [gasoline tax] and mileage-based tax is that it gives ODOT an incentive to promote more driving to obtain more revenue."
Robert Brown, treasurer of Case Western Reserve University and a member of Ohio's transportation task force, said placing transponders in cars raises several serious issues. "There are some privacy issues because essentially somebody or some machine somewhere needs to kind of know where your car is," Brown, a former assistant director of ODOT, told the paper. "Also, how do you ensure that if a transponder is built into every vehicle that it is not tampered with? There are an awful lot of policy issues for people to grapple with."
Brown said he supports increasing the gasoline tax instead.
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