Gas-tax increase sought for Utah

Local government leaders are trying to get residents — and their state representatives — to swallow some strong medicine to improve traffic conditions along the Wasatch Front.

Specifically, they want their constituents to accept increased gasoline taxes to improve and expand roads and mass transit — taxes that would automatically increase with inflation, unlike present gasoline taxes. They also want to bring back PhotoCop.

The photo-radar traffic enforcement system was used by Sandy, Layton and West Valley City in the 1990s — mostly West Valley — with significant success in reducing accidents. The system was opposed, however, by a significant portion of the population, and in 1996 the Legislature limited its use to school zones, basically eliminating it.

"Obviously some people will balk at, you might say, spying on them," Draper Mayor Darrell Smith said. "It's way early to predict (whether legislators will agree to reinstate PhotoCop) — maybe they're not that supportive right now, but it's a long time to the session."

Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson has expressed his support of PhotoCop — trademark for a particular photo-radar system wherein a radar gun and camera are used to monitor motorists, with violators being issued citations in the mail.

Other local officials have signed on. Mayors of cities within Salt Lake County unanimously agreed in a Council of Governments meeting that they would join Anderson in pursuing the matter at the state level.

"We had it in place 2 1/2 years, and in that time accidents went down 17 percent," West Valley Mayor Dennis Nordfelt said. Nordfelt was the city's police chief during the PhotoCop years.

As far as the gasoline tax, the Wasatch Front Regional Council and Mountainlands Association of Governments, among others, submitted a proposal to the Legislature's Transportation Planning Task Force in October, advocating a number of new taxes, including a new inflation-indexed gas tax.

The Council of Governments has now unanimously signed off on that. Localities also want the option to impose their own gasoline tax, in addition to the taxes imposed by the state.

"Our roads are at capacity or over capacity in the Wasatch Front right now," Nordfelt said. "By 2015, our entire system will be failing, and that will not only have a negative impact on the quality of life but our ability for economic development. . . . We need considerably more resources to deal with this problem, and we're talking about billions of dollars."