A gas tax proposal that would increase the price of fuel by 12.5 cents over five years has passed out of the Senate and is now pending in the House.
“It will eventually be assigned to the House Transportation Committee but it hasn't been referred yet,” said Ross Lien, director of legislative affairs with the Missouri Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
If passed, SB 262 would raise some $500 million annually to fund bridge and road improvements.
“It's an incremental increase over five years, which means it will increase two and a half cents each year for five years," Lien told the St. Louis Record. "The total gas tax statewide would increase to just shy of 30 cents a gallon.”
The bill includes a provision that would facilitate a refund for Missourians who don’t want to pay the increase.
“Drivers would keep all their gas receipts for the entire year and then when they filed their tax returns, they would file a separate form along with their taxes with those receipts to receive a full refund,” Lien said in an interview.
Missouri has the seventh-largest road system in the country but ranks 45th nationwide in terms of per mile funding, he said.
“We have a very large system and one of the lower funding mechanisms nationwide,” Lien said. “We just don't have enough money to keep up with that large of a system and the state has not increased its current gas tax of 17 cents a gallon since 1996. The buying power of that 17 cents has decreased dramatically since the 1990s.”
The tax, if approved, would start in October 2021 and end July 1, 2026, according to media reports.
“There's definitely opposition,” Lien said. “There are a lot of conservative Republicans...who are concerned about raising taxes for anything, whether it’s income taxes, corporate taxes, or a fuel tax because many politicians signed a no tax increase pledge. That's something we're dealing with.”
Regarding which bridges and roads would be repaired, Lien said the Missouri Department of Transportation would decide based on a priority list of top need categories.
“We get matching dollars from the federal government,” he said. “So under this new infrastructure plan, to get the full amount of money that Missouri needs or could get from the federal government, we need to have matching funds that right now we probably don't have. So, increasing funding would allow us to get that whole allotment of dollars from the federal government.”
SB 262 would also establish an Electric Vehicle Task Force to analyze and issue a report no later than Dec. 31, 2022, regarding the impact of electric vehicle adoption on transportation funding.