Will Gov. Walker propose a gas-tax hike?

Will Gov. Olene Walker be suggesting a gasoline tax hike this week?

Or will she just sweep the corners of Utah's $7 billion budget to find $150 million more next year for public and higher education, carrying the programs until she leaves office in January 2005?

Walker is mum on how her "revenue enhancements" will appear next Monday afternoon when she formally recommends her 2004-05 budget to state lawmakers.

Walker has previously said she won't suggest a tax increase. That would normally apply to sales, income, property and gasoline taxes.

But aides to Utah's first female chief executive have been hinting that some kind of new tax dollars should come into state government next year for increased support for public and higher education.

Deputy chief of staff Lynne Ward recently said local counties have been "getting a windfall" because 1/16th of a cent in state sales tax has been earmarked for local road projects. The gas tax should be the revenue source for such roadwork, she added.

And earlier this week, Walker's spokeswoman, Amanda Covington, declined to say if Walker considers the current 24.5-cents-per-gallon tax on motor fuels a tax or a user fee.

But whether you call the gas tax a "tax" or a "user fee," such an increase will meet stiff resistance from the 2004 Legislature, say GOP legislative leaders.

House Speaker Marty Stephens, R-Farr West — who is running for governor next year — told the Deseret Morning News this week that he personally won't support a gas tax hike this year and doesn't believe most other legislators will, either.

The gasoline tax was last increased in 1997. At the time, former Gov. Mike Leavitt (Walker was his lieutenant governor) said the tax increase should go up to help pay for a multi-billion-dollar reconstruction of I-15 and other road projects in the newly created Centennial Highway Fund.

But Leavitt also refused to admit raising the gas tax was a tax hike. He called it a periodically required adjustment to a user fee.

Conservative legislators seven years ago didn't buy Leavitt's name change — from gas tax to user fee. And Leavitt's gas tax hike was stalled in the House until he agreed to cut the state sales tax by one-eighth of a cent to offset the gas tax hike.

Lawmakers could then claim the gas tax increase, combined with the sales tax cut, was a tax shift instead of increase required to pay for huge new road projects.