City Council missing key pieces in gas-tax proposal

You don’t have to drive far on Albuquerque’s streets to find a spot in need of repair — so it’s a safe bet that, given assurances every penny would go to maintaining existing roads, a majority of city residents would be willing to fork over an additional 2 cents per gallon of gas to fund repair work.

But the $4.8 million question is how the city is spending all the tens of millions of dollars in road tax money it gets now, as well as how will it be able to spend any new dollars.

City Council President Isaac Benton is proposing a 2-cent increase in the gas tax to raise an estimated $4.8 million a year in new revenue for city road repairs. The city could then use that money to secure significantly more in bond funding for road projects, he says. The city does not impose a gas tax now but receives a cut of the state gasoline tax.

When Benton first floated this in January, the Journal raised the concern that city consumers were already “funding transportation projects via a dedicated quarter-cent grossreceipts tax on goods and services. They have been forking over an extra 25 cents on every $100 purchase for 17 years.”

Albuquerque’s quarter-cent transportation GRT runs through 2019. It brings in an estimated $37 million a year, with the revenue specifically dedicated to roads (59 percent), transit (36 percent), and bike paths and trails (5 percent). When it was up for renewal in 2009, then-City Councilor Debbie O’Malley (now a Bernalillo county commissioner) argued to cut the transportation tax in half because it had brought in almost $50 million more than expected in its first 10-year iteration — and all that extra cash was unspent.

Without an accounting of how much is already coming in for roads and where it’s going, it’s hard to pave the way to another almost $5 million in annual taxes, no matter how many potholes you hit on the way to work.

Benton’s measure is slated to go before the full council May 1. If it passes, it heads to Mayor Richard Berry for consideration, and if Berry signs it, it goes to voters Oct. 3. If voters approve, the tax would take effect on July 1, 2018.

To his credit, Benton is working toward putting the gastax decision before voters, unlike Bernalillo County, which circumvented them with its recent GRT increase. But like the county, Benton has yet to show the tax is really justified.