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Transportation chief touts concept, which White House rejects
By Rebecca Cole | Washington Bureau
February 21, 2009
WASHINGTON — As quickly as talk of taxing mileage instead of gasoline surfaced in the Obama Cabinet, the White House sank it.
Concerned that traditional gas taxes cannot keep pace with the cost of building and repairing highways, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Friday that he was considering taxing motorists according to miles driven.
But President Barack Obama has no interest in such a tax, the White House swiftly said.
"I can weigh in on it and say that it is not, and will not be, the policy of the Obama administration," said Robert Gibbs, White House press secretary. The spokesman succinctly added later: "It's a no-go."
Even the concept — which would require the placement of global positioning satellite tracking devices in the cars and trucks that everyone drives — strikes some critics as a colossal invasion of privacy, with the government tracking the travel of all motorists.
Yet the idea of a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax already has been road-tested successfully in some places as an alternative to gas taxes.
The Obama administration's new transportation secretary elevated the debate by suggesting the federal government should take a mileage tax seriously.
"We should look at the vehicular miles program, where people are actually clocked on the number of miles that they traveled," LaHood told The Associated Press on Friday.
LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, is the sole registered Republican in the new president's Cabinet. Obama, a Democratic former senator from Illinois, tapped a trusted ally for transportation.
The White House quickly shelved the secretary's mileage tax talk, directing any questions to LaHood about whether he had spoken out of turn.
"Secretary LaHood was giving the spectrum of options available for funding of the national transportation system," LaHood spokeswoman Lori Irving said, "and was not advocating a VMT-based taxing system."
The nation's aging infrastructure of roads and bridges is in dire need of cash, but revenue from the gas tax is not enough to cover federally promised maintenance and repair projects. Last fall, Congress injected $8 billion to cover the shortfall.
And with the advent of fuel-efficient and electric cars, experts say, revenue from the gas tax will continue to dwindle.
"One of the things I think everyone agrees with around reauthorization of the highway bill is that the highway trust fund is an antiquated system for funding our highways," LaHood said.
While the idea of a mileage toll may seem radical, taxing motorists for the number of miles they drive rather than how much gas they burn may not be so far off.
In Oregon, the idea already has been tested in a 2006 pilot program of 285 vehicles, and the Oregon Department of Transportation deemed it a "proof-of-concept" success. Last month, Gov. Ted Kulongoski presented recommendations to the legislature to move away from the gas tax as a central funding source for transportation.
This isn't the first time that Oregon has pioneered in the field of transportation. In 1919, it became the first state to enact a gas tax.
The state is taking a similar lead with its Road User Fee Pilot Program, a 12-month study launched in 2006 that measured the viability of an electronic collection system for a VMT tax to replace the gas tax. With a $2.1 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration, the state outfitted two service stations in the Portland area with mileage-reading technology and recruited 260 volunteers to have passive, receiving-only GPS devices implanted in their vehicles. The tracking counts their mileage but doesn't record their locations.
James Whitty, manager of the state Office of Innovative Partnerships and Alternative Funding, which oversaw the project, says the test proved that the technology is viable, but people still have "visceral reactions" when they hear abut the concept — especially concerning the issue of privacy.
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