Residual Forces

MPR has a story about the upcoming MN Legislature and their transportation agenda. Or rather their plan to raise your taxes in various forms, and add a few new forms.

St. Paul, Minn. — Matt Dawson’s mind is made up. With the exception of using one of those one hour rental car services a couple times a week Dawson has dropped out of the car culture.

Dawson, a 28-year old Minneapolis resident, relies on public buses for most of his commuting to and from his various theater jobs, and he’s all in favor of more transit.

“I just love the light rail and I wish we could some more, get it a little bit extended,” he says.

Matt Dawson is part of Minnesota’s transportation solution and he’s part of the problem. He’s ditched his car for transit lessening by one the glut of single occupant vehicles in Twin Cities rush hour congestion. But by no longer buying gasoline for his 12-year old Chevy Dawson is no longer a contributor through the state gasoline tax to the state highway trust fund.

That’s the big pot of money that pays for a good share of road and bridge building in Minnesota.

Of course the story starts off with one of the liberal ‘I really wish this was New York’ bums who expects the rest of us to provide him with transportation to his job. Mind you his job is at different places all the time. Which common sense would say that is a perfect reason to drive your own lazy butt to and fro.

Unlike Matt Dawson most Minnesotan’s are driving more not less. So, one would expect gas tax revenues to be higher. But the vehicles are slightly more fuel efficient, and a small but increasing number of them burn fuels that aren’t taxed or are taxed at a lower rate.

The result is that in 2005, for the first time in nearly a quarter of century, Minnesota’s gasoline tax revenue declined. Lawmakers can no longer count on year after year of stellar increases in gas tax revenue.

So all those environmental mandates have finally begun to harm the mass hysteria cause of transit. As cars get MORE fuel efficient, gas tax revenues drop, and with the MPG standards getting cranked up more and more, that is a trend that will continue. Meanwhile, that money is being drained away so Matt Dawson can have his travels subsidized by you and me.

Some say the solution is to raise more money with a higher gas tax and registration or tab fees. A nickel more on the gas tax raises about $160 million. A 1 percent tab fee increase raises about $5 million.

Um, didn’t they just point out how gas consumption is going down? Hey, how will the E-85 craze fit in? Is that taxed the same as gasoline, or is it tax free? But of course we all know what they are up to, they want you out of your car,m and they aim to make it so financially painful for you and me to drive that we will all beg for us to rip up those pesky roads so we can have rails everywhere, no matter the cost or benefit to our society.

Minnesota House Transportation Finance committee chairman Bernie Lieder, DFL-Crookston, says wait a minute.

“I definitely don’t want to jump into it and say we’re going to raise this tax or any other tax until you get a feel for what’s going on here,” he says.

‘Here’ is the state capitol.

Rep. Lieder personally favors raising the gas tax and tab fees. However one estimate puts the state short more than $1 billion a year in money for meeting transportation needs.

Keep an eye on your wallet, that’s a billion dollars they want to find.

Senate Transportation Committee chairman Steve Murphy, DFL-Red Wing, is urging people to lower their expectations for how much money can be raised.

“Even with the best bill that we can get through the legislature we’re not going to come close to meeting those expectations,” he says.

Murphy and Lieder say they want to see what consensus they can build among lawmakers. Consensus will help avoid the legislative gridlock that has plagued transportation funding packages in prior sessions. Consensus might also mean having enough votes to override a veto by Gov. Pawlenty who has said he will not approve a transportation funding bill with a gas tax increase.

In other words, the DFL legislative leaders are hell bent on raising your taxes.

The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce is among the most ardent and powerful voices urging action on transportation funding. Chamber President David Olson says proposals to raise lots of money risk driving away supporters.

Too late jackarse, you were the one who rammed that goll dang MVST amendment through. Did you know that since 2003 that MVST tax revenue has been falling, and what was supposed to be this $400 million dollar influx of money for roads, was actually only $230 million and falling? I bet you didn’t because the MN Chamber didn’t want you to, because you would have voted against it.

If lawmakers worry about taxpayer reaction to higher gas taxes and tab fees, they’re also hearing from their constituents about property tax increases.

Property taxes are rising at double digit rates in many locales.

One of the reasons is local officials’ increasing reliance on property tax revenue for transportation, according to Minnesota Transportation Alliance lobbyist Margaret Donahue.

“When state revenues like the gas tax and license tab fees and even the motor vehicle sales tax don’t keep up, then local governments really have no choice but to look to local property taxes to fix their local roads,” Donahue says.

What, you mean they are all not keeping up? Well, gee, why don’t we build more LRT lines so we can have fewer people contributing to the revenue stream? Brilliant, yes. Let’s focus all our attention to spending more than a billion dollars per 20,000 commuters and in no time flat we will finally figure out that transit is not the solution for our problem. Wait, what, that doesn’t make sense.

You see most people don’t go from A to B, and need to have flexible transportation, like their own cars. So they can make different stops at different places, all of which aren’t along these ridiculous LRT lines. But then again, the criminal powers that be pushing these things want to redevelop these areas with new stuff.

Are we going to rebuild our society to meet the needs of the LRT lines, or should we make our transportation system meet our needs? I prefer the later, but then again, I have a functioning brain stem and not a social engineer orientated elected official who is surrounded by special interests and has long lost touch with the actual users of the transportation system.

As for additional transit funding some Twin Cities area lawmakers and county officials favor a metro-wide sales tax dedicated to transportation including transit. But again, agreement is elusive.

Was that on your ballot? Oh yeah, I forgot, no one bothered to make this election about the actual differences between DFLers and Republicans. One is going to tax their way out of a problem (Read sweep it under the rug by throwing money at it) the other is going to (or should be) trying to actually solve the problem before money is just thrown at it (read drop the stupid idea that trains can solve EVERYONE’s problems since they only serve a few thousand people out our two plus million commuters in just the Twin Cities.)

The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce opposes the idea. The Minnesota Transportation Alliance has favored it in the past. The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy likes the idea.

The MCEA describes the Twin Cities as transit starved. MCEA attorney Jim Erkel says a sales tax trumps other ideas for addressing the issue.

Remember what I said, this is a Environutter group favoring a massive tax increase on your car. The funding gap (lower gas tax revenue from vehicle efficiency) is a problem they helped create by lobbying government to raise MPG standards. Now they want to raise your taxes so it is too expensive to drive your car, thus getting to their actual goal of doing away with your fossil fuel burning car all together. Think about it, its an environutter group, they don’t give a rats ass about transportation, except for making sure you do it in a green way.

“Looking around it’s [Twin City Sales Tax] the one thing that has a broad enough base. It spreads out the joy or the pain depending on your point of view, and it can raise the kind of money that is required to fully implement a well planned transit system,” Erkel says.

Notice how he said ‘transit system’? He has no intentions of building roads. He wants to build trains and LRT.

Polls don’t supply much insight on how Minnesota taxpayers feel about transportation funding. Transportation advocates are cheered by the 57% of Minnesota voters who approved spending all, not just half, of the vehicle sales tax revenue on transportation. But that’s not a new tax. And it’s not reliable evidence in the minds of some lawmakers that Minnesotans’ are ready to dig deeper to pay for transportation.

They haven’t ever done a poll on it. And I doubt they could give you an accurate pulse of where people stand. Except that of the 2.5 million or so people who travel in or out of the Twin Cities every day, 95% of us are in cars or trucks. Maybe that would shed some much needed light on this subject they don’t want to get to the bottom of.

They want trains dang it, and no fact will get in their way.

Do you still have a hand on that wallet? You better not lose sight of it for the next two years, because DFL social engineers legislators are trying to figure out how to get as much money out of you as possible so they can try to build their utopian society. It will cost billions, and YOU and I will be paying for their dreams, which are really our nightmares.

[end rant, let blood pressure drop to normal level again]