Raised from half a cent to 2.5 cents per gallon in April 2003, ostensibly to pay for a backlog of cleanup claims, the fee is on top of the 21-cent-per-gallon state tax on gasoline.

The effects of the initial deep spending cuts are still being felt, especially in cities and towns, which absorbed reductions of about $400 million, or 9 percent, in the first 18 months of Romney's term.

Cities and towns now rely on property taxes to pay 53 percent of their budgets, a 25-year high and up from 49 percent before Romney took office, said Geoffrey Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Many communities cut services and raised fees as a result, he said.

Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney's spokesman, said local officials exaggerate the impact of the cuts, which were a response to a nearly 15-percent plunge in state tax revenues one year.

"Cities and towns share in the state's revenues when times are good, but they also must share in the belt-tightening when times are bad," he said.

Data compiled by The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, shows that during Romney's four years as governor, the state and local tax burden in Massachusetts increased from 10 percent to 10.6 percent of per capita income.

Another shift hit students at state colleges and universities, where fees soared 63 percent during Romney's tenure, from an average of $2,959 in 2003 to $4,836 in 2007, according to the state Board of Higher Education. The fee hikes were enacted by each campus to offset deep budget cuts of about $140 million, or about 14 percent,during the fiscal crisis.

Of Romney's assertion about the 2005 surplus, "There never was a $1 billion surplus," said Michael J. Widmer, president of the business-funded Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

The state comptroller's office reported a surplus of $594.4 million, but Widmer said that overstates the true surplus because it includes a $150-million accounting change that pushed payment of Medicaid bills into the next fiscal year.

Early in his administration, Romney contended that he squeezed more than $1 billion in waste out of the budget. "I said at the time it was no more than $100 million in waste he eliminated through reforms, and I was being very generous," Widmer said. "Reform had next to nothing to do with the change in the state's financial picture."

Fehrnstrom replied that there were many internal efficiencies that produced savings. "We wanted people to get more efficient, so we cut budgets," he said.