Uinta Basin counties appeal for road funds

Heavy tanker trucks loaded with "black gold" that provide a significant boost to the Uinta Basin also create a major drag on the bicounty area's infrastructure.

Even with the additional revenue being pumped into the counties because of increased oil and gas production, neither Duchesne nor Uintah counties can keep up with the road maintenance needed because of the wear caused by the tankers. Additionally, the counties are not able to build or pave the new roads needed to access the increasingly remote oil wells scattered throughout the area.

Those maintenance shortfalls are occurring despite the contribution of tens of millions of dollars to the state's general fund through the oil and gas severance tax, Duchesne County Commissioner Larry Ross said, an amount which accounts for much of the direct revenue from the oil and gas production. This year, the severance tax is expected to net the state $62 million, of which an estimated 80 percent comes from the Uinta Basin.

"There is a tremendous need for improvement to the roads that resource is travelling across," Ross told the Tax Review Commission meeting in Salt Lake City Friday. Costs to build roads that can handle the oil tankers are estimated at $500,000 per mile, something "we can't even come close to doing with our present income."

To fix the problem, Ross said that at least a portion of the severance tax money needs to be dedicated to the counties that generate the revenue, either through a credit or by establishing a reserve account the counties can tap for infrastructure improvements. It is a proposal, however, that has already failed in the Legislature multiple times, including a 2005 bill that would have put 25 percent of the severance tax into an infrastructure fund.

Returning a large chunk of the severance tax to the energy-producing counties presents a number of problems in regard to fairness, however, since not all resource companies — specifically coal mines — pay the tax, yet those counties with coal mines suffer the same infrastructure problems. There are also a number of other tax revenues that are generated more heavily by one area, such as education funding, but distributed throughout the state at the discretion of legislators, said commission member Gary Cornia.

"The problem may be how we allocate revenues to those counties," he said. "Maybe it should be the responsibility of the state to fund these impacted counties."