A Tax Too Far

On the face of it, it sounds fair.

If you don't like the state gasoline tax, then how about taxing you based on how many miles you drive a year?

Well, the study is underway...

It's called a mileage tax, and the Department of Transportation says it is one of the revenue mechanisms we should be looking at in the future.

So a study by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A & M is doing just that.

It goes like this, somehow, either intrusively, electronically or some other way, the state notes how many miles you drive in a certain time period.

And you are taxed on that.

Terri Hall is director of Texans United for Reform and Freedom.

"At the end of the day,” she says, “there are going to be people hurt by it, and at the end of the day we have to remind ourselves, is this something that is taking us more toward liberty and freedom
or more toward government control of our freedom to travel."

And corridor critics just don’t trust Governor Perry.

"The most expensive way to fund our roads,” Hall said, “is the way that Governor Perry has chosen and that's through tolls."

Supporters say it's a user fee, but others say it penalizes rural areas like ours, and favors dense, big cities like Houston or Dallas.

Representative Leo Berman says,"People living in Houston can take a bus, people living in Dallas can take their little trains. People living in Tyler, if we have to go somewhere, we have to jump in our cars."

Others say, we have a user fee. It's called the gas tax and it's simple.

Berman says though, this new fee is dead on arrival...

"We don't have to build 5 billion dollars a year,” Berman contends. ‘We can build 3 billion dollars a year. We can slow down. Making sure that our current roads are maintained, until we hit a point in time where the funds are available to do what we want to do."

But Representative Berman told us, until TxDot is reigned in and out gas taxes used in the way they were intended, there's no way any other tax should be on the agenda.