At the end of 18 months and nine meetings — including a grueling eight-hour rehash of facts and figures on Tuesday — the line containing the two big blanks projected on screens behind Gov. Butch Otter’s transportation task force at the Capitol.

After all the studies, lobbying, discussions, and media to and fro, that is what it all came down to. Was this committee that Otter ordered after getting his 10-cent gas tax increase idea shunned by Republican colleagues last year going to follow through on its inclinations and suggest a hike? Would the group lay out for legislators a concrete path for how to address the transportation department’s staggering funding shortfall by ?

No on both counts.

With task force members discussing peripheral particulars and no one straight up addressing the blanks, committee chair Lt. Gov. Brad Little called a 10-minute break. During the intermission, Little huddled with Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Sen. John McGee, R-Caldwell behind the dais. The break over, Little called on McGee, who said the group had accomplished much and pushed the proceedings toward a close.

“We will now be able to provide the Legislature and the governor much more information on what it’s going to take to maintain and operate Idaho’s roads,” he said. The task force, he said, had fleshed out the issue. “We have taken a long-term look and a thorough look at transportation across the state.”

The task force had determined  the Idaho Transportation Department needs about $500 million more per year, had conducted a study that found semi-trucks pay far too little for highway maintenance and that cars pay way too much, considering how much damage each inflicts on roads, and had compiled a list of ways road funding might be generated to pass along to legislators, including a gas tax, a tax on wholesale fuel sales, and an excise tax on car rentals.

“We’ve now ranked what this task force believes is palatable,” McGee said. “We’ve made those determinations. That’s on the list of the accomplishments of this task force. If we go now and try to plug in numbers it becomes futile because the variables and the factors are changing so much … I don’t know how we’re going to come to any conclusions on that. We’ve done a lot of great stuff already.”

Prior to McGee’s speech, Rep. Dennis Lake, R-Blackfoot, said the task force would be falling short if it didn’t offer specifics.

“Where I get hung up, we say we’re recommending we increase revenue by ‘X’ number. Why in the world would we want to not tell them how? The credibility of the task force is on the hook out there. If we want to punt to them (the Legislature) and say ‘you figure it out,’ then we haven’t done our job. We need to tell them how to get there.”

Lake cast the only vote against making recommendations presenting the amount ITD needs and offering the list of methods to produce the needed money.
 After the meeting, Lake said: “I expected the task force to make some specific recommendations. I think there were people, including ITD, that were looking for specifics.”

However, Lake did agree with McGee, and others on the committee, who said the group did well generating more information for lawmakers to work with. Task force member Jim Riley, a representative of the forest products industry, agreed, saying, “I am Ok with the thinking that this task force defer to the governor and the legislature on how and when to satisfy (funding) need.”

Rep. Marv Hagedorn, R-Meridian, said: “I think we’ve drilled down to the point where we know what those (funding) expectations  are now. I think that we have accomplished a lot.”

But Dave Carlson, AAA Idaho’s longtime director of governmental relations, said the task force failed to face up to the study showing cars pay too much and trucks too little.

“They backed out of a discussion about policy that we think would have broadened the entire tax base and would have created solutions far more palatable to the public.”
 He went on: “I’m not sure the questions were answered equal to the charge that the governor asked for in the first place.”

Carlson, and others, including Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keith Allred, had called for trucks to pay higher registration fees based on weight. 
The task force, Carlson said, did not “consider the value of a study  that we thought clearly changed the landscape on how transportation funding in this  state should be accomplished … the committee members looked like they were trying to find answers, to put business interests ahead of taxpayers’ interest. That’s unfortunate.”

McGee, in an interview after the meeting, said the situation is not so black and white.

“It’s not as simple as cars versus trucks,” he said, noting the role in the economy trucks play and the potential negative impacts on commerce a fee increase might cause. “We have think beyond the visceral reaction we have to the study.”

House Transportation Committee Chair Rep. JoAn Wood, R-Rigby, questioned if the state’s system was indeed out of whack and suggested the cost-allocation study wasn’t complete.

“There may be some information coming forward,” she said. “I can see a bit of discomfort with that we’re saying that it’s not a balanced system … we’re not sure we’re not in a balanced system.”

So says AAA Idaho.

“We see a system that’s broken,” Dave Carlson, AAA Idaho director of public and government affairs, told the board of the Idaho Transportation Department Wednesday. Referring to a recent independent study concluding that heavy trucks aren’t putting up their fair share in relation to how much damage they do, he said, “We think we must begin to close the gap.”

Carlson gave the board AAA’s take on how to address ITD’s staggering funding shortfall in anticipation of Gov. Butch Otter’s “Task Force on Modernizing Transportation Funding” meeting for the ninth and final time next week and settling on recommendations to the Legislature on how to bring in more money. ITD figures it needs around $250 million more each year just to keep up with maintenance.

Car owners pay registration fees of about $45 per year while operators of semi-trucks pay about $3,400 annually. Still, the ITD-commissioned study concluded cars and light trucks are overpaying for roads by 47 percent, while heavy trucks are underpaying by 33 percent. A new based-on-weight charge on big trucks could generate $50 to $60 million per year. 
”The study verifies that the equity gap between what cars and big trucks pay for our roads has become a full blown breach,” reads material Carlson presented board members.
 Trucking industry advocates have said the study does not properly consider benefits to the economy that big trucks deliver. No one representing the industry testified Wednesday.

Members of Otter’s task force, chaired by Lt. Gov. Brad Little, have indicated they favor an increase of Idaho’s 25-cent gas tax, a tax on wholesale fuel sales, creating an excise tax on car rentals, or raising registration fees on cars and light trucks, and not raising fees for big trucks.

Putting an additional burden on cars and light trucks “sounds like a replay of Governor Otter’s recommended transportation revenue packages from 2008 and 2009, which relied on gas tax and registration fees paid disproportionately by passenger vehicles,” reads AAA’s argument. “And that action would be at odds with the charge issued to the task force to find suitable, long-term funding solutions.”

AAA, which counts 100,000 members in Idaho, grudgingly supported Otter’s call last year for a 10-cent gas-tax increase.

“We really don’t have a dog in this fight,” Patrick Balducci of the consulting contractor Battelle told lawmakers Monday afternoon.  “The output of our model doesn’t typically discriminate against different vehicles.”  He is leading a six-month study that will offer more data to the Governor’s Task Force on Modernizing Transportation Funding.  His project began in December and a final report should be finished by the end of June.  The study will cost the state about $200,000, according to the Idaho Department of Transportation.

The new data should help lawmakers trying to decide on where to find new funding for road construction that is stable and politically palatable.  Gov. Butch Otter set up the task force after lawmakers rejected his proposals for tax and fee increases to fund highway infrastructure needs last year.  The task force has a December deadline.

“The study will guide us if we make decisions that ask for further funding from the public,” said House Transportation Committee Chair JoAn Wood, R-Rigby.  “If we have a study that verifies the responsibility of different users, then it would be much easier for us to carry a request to the public for added participation in cost.”  She said more fuel-efficient vehicles and rising prices of oil would likely skew the funding equity.  “We have to depend on something besides the fuel tax if it continues to go that way,” she said.  One alternative source she mentioned would be dedicating the sales tax on new and used vehicles as well as tires and auto parts to highway construction.  That money currently goes into the general fund.

Representatives for drivers and truckers both spoke in favor of the study to find equitable funding for roads.  Dave Carlson with AAA Idaho said the results would inform any discussion on new revenue for roads.  “It’s going to be a much easier pill to swallow, frankly, when we’re all asked to pay an equity that’s consistent with what we all use,” he said.

“There’s got to be more funds and they’ve got to be spent on the roads in order to protect the commerce of the state of Idaho,” said Clay Handy of Handy Truck Line.

The Highway Cost Allocation Study will look at how cars, trucks, busses, and other vehicles pay for highway construction, as well as how they use and wear out roads, bridge, rest stops, and other parts of the road infrastructure.  Balducci included several policy options from a similar study in Nevada in 2008.  Those options included raising the tax on diesel or gas, increasing registration fees for heavy trucks, and other taxing hikes and tweaks.  Balducci said he could examine other policy options that members of the task force or the Idaho Transportation Department want him to consider.