70% of Utahns oppose raising gas tax to fund transportation

Although government and business leaders may favor increasing the gas tax to pay for construction and maintenance of roads and transportation, a new poll shows the majority of Utahns — 70 percent — oppose such a tax increase.

Salt Lake City pollster Dan Jones and Associates surveyed 413 Utah residents Jan. 15-17, and only 29 percent definitely or probably supported a tax hike, while 70 percent probably or definitely opposed it. The margin of error is 5 percent.

People are suffering with job losses or insecurity over whether they'll be employed in upcoming months, said Rolayne Fairclough, spokeswoman for AAA Utah, which has come out in support of funding transportation projects with new fuel taxes. They also are struggling with increases in the cost of food, utilities and goods, and a tax hike is not appealing right now.

"I can simply understand why people don't want to see any kind of gas increase," she said. "People are uncertain and they're concerned."

But the state, too, has less tax revenues than it did last year. "The unfortunate problem with this is that the transportation infrastructure really does need attention," said Fairclough, who sits on a transportation committee at the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, which advocates changing the way the state funds transportation.

That committee last week announced it had advocated an additional 10-cents per gallon "user fee" for gasoline and diesel, which was estimated to add $100 million in new revenue for the state. The state's gas tax is currently 24.5 cents a gallon.

However, the chamber's board of governors, which represents executive management in local and national companies with sometimes-opposing interests, never formally approved a position to advocate such specifics. Instead, the board said last week that the Utah Legislature, which begins a new session on Monday, should consider new revenue streams to address transportation infrastructure.

If gas was taxed like a sales tax, it would rise and fall with the purchase price. On Thursday, a gallon of regular unleaded cost $1.64, according to AAA, down from summer's all-time high of $4.22. But the price of oil is expected to increase in coming years, and locally, extra revenue could be generated as the price of gas rose — something that would not happen with the static fuel tax.

In November, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. began discussing taxing fuel in different ways — from assessing additional user fees per gallon to a percentage of the total sales price. When his proposed budget was released, however, there were no such changes.