Campaign is heating up

Ask any highway engineer or transportation planner and they will tell you the gasoline tax has to be increased periodically to keep pace with the rising costs of highway construction.

Ask a politician and chances are you will get a "no new taxes" pledge or something close to it.

The gas tax took center stage Monday during a debate sponsored by Utah construction industries that featured the eight candidates (or their designees) seeking the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

And true to script, the politicians treated a gas tax increase like smallpox. All but one.

Only Speaker of the House Marty Stephens spoke in favor of a gas tax increase, saying it is impossible for candidates to say they will build highways without increased bonding or without increasing the gas tax. It simply cannot be done, he said, and merely saying other options must be considered is nothing more than campaign rhetoric.

"The fuel tax has to be raised periodically. If not, it loses its buying power," Stephens said.

Stephens, a Farr West Republican and among the most conservative candidates in the field, favors an increase in the gas tax, but he also wants to see other taxes decreased by the same amount. In 1997, when the Legislature last increased the gas tax, lawmakers reduced the state sales tax by an amount equivalent to the nickel-a-gallon gas tax increase.

The other candidates were not buying into Stephens' argument. And they weren't about to go on record supporting a tax increase when state delegates are less than two weeks away from meeting at the GOP convention to decide which candidates advance to a primary election.

Businessman Fred Lampropoulos said the state's new CEO must look at options other than increased debt and increased taxes, and he suggested restrained fiscal growth in government and a blossoming economy could generate more money for roads.

And state Sen. Parley Hellewell, R-Orem, wants the private sector to educate more of Utah's children at half the cost, something that could free up more than a billion dollars for highways, he said.

Utah County Commissioner Gary Herbert, the lieutenant governor running mate with Jon Huntsman Jr., said highways could be funded with a 2 percent reduction in the $8 billion state budget that could be redirected to highways. And former U.S. Rep. Jim Hansen thinks increased royalties from greater mineral extraction could be used to pay for roads.

The only one other than Stephens to even hint at a possible gas tax increase was Gov. Olene Walker's representative, John Njord, the director of the Utah Department of Transportation.

"Gov. Walker does not anticipate a gas tax increase immediately," he said, but it is something she believes "must be revisited every five to seven years."