The Gadfly is a series of letters offering commentary on local issues and published in the Warrensburg Gazette.

Dear Editor

Our Missouri House of Representatives can't seem to get enough of trying to raise taxes. A while back I wrote about HJR5, which would make it easier for school districts to go into debt by lowering the ‘supermajority’ requirement at certain elections. This proposed constitutional amendment has passed the House and is awaiting Senate action. If it gets through the House & Senate, we’ll vote on it later in the year.

Now the House is getting ready to pass a package of bills (HB924 & others) to ‘save our highways.’ As usual, they’ve combined worthwhile changes with special fund allocations & spending for special interests. Here’s what the bills would do:

• Raise our gasoline tax and repeal the sunset on the 6 cent tax they passed without our vote a few years ago.
• Raise our sales tax by ¾ of 1% across the board.
• Significantly increase vehicle registration fees, more so for commercial & larger vehicles than for personal ones.
• Return to the highway department highway money that’s been allocated to other agencies.
• Require the highway department to double the miles of highway it maintains in Missouri’s fastest-shrinking major city, St. Louis.
• Replace the current highway commission with a politically appointed scapegoat-in-chief.

There’s no doubt that our roads are in deplorable shape, in part because the existing money is spread so thinly. The state maintains our lettered roads while equivalent roads in many other states are county-maintained. Another problem is that highway costs keep going up because of oil price changes and federally-mandated wage rates that contractors must pay.

While I question most new taxes, at least the gasoline tax and the vehicle registration fees bear directly on those who use the roads, and the heavy trucks that do the damage will pay a larger share. People who don’t have cars or drive still pay, but only tangentially through increased prices caused by increased delivery costs.

We should all strongly object to using sales taxes to fund highways. Here’s 2 reasons why:

• Local city and county governments depend on sales taxes as their largest source of funding. Since resistance to passing new local taxes will build as overall sales tax rates increase, their ability to raise new funds will be decreased. For example, Warrensburg’s sales tax would be 7.975% and the lodging tax would break 10%.
• A full 20% of the tax would go into the bottomless pit of money-losing mass transit systems and other non-highway uses.

What can we do now? Write our state senators & representatives and tell them to raise new highway money from the people who use the roads - lay off sales taxes!