Our View: Detouring taxes to roads is a bad idea

If this is the best House Republicans can do to settle the road repair stalemate, fellow legislators had better be choosy.

The Republicans' combo plate of bills contains a bad idea that sets a bad precedent: siphoning off sales and income tax money to repair highways and bridges.

Not only is this a bad idea, it is a disingenuous one. These new sales and income tax dollars would not magically materialize and turn into chip seal and blacktop. Dollars would go to roads rather than public schools, universities, Medicaid or other state needs.

House Republicans are selling an ill-advised plan that wouldn't create new money. It would instead intensify the zero-sum competition over the same old dollars, by bringing another huge agency into the free-for-all.

Which is why the state has never played this game, and wisely so. The Idaho Transportation Department does not get a dime from Idaho's general fund budget - the budget that pays for schools and most other state programs. Funded largely by federal dollars, state gas taxes and vehicle registration fees, the ITD has been a free-standing operation.

This time-honored system isn't broken. House Republicans are talking about junking it for the sake of short-term expediency - they're searching for a way to break their impasse with Republican Gov. Butch Otter and to appear to address the road repair issue.

Let's remember why House Republicans are selling this idea. They are doing this because the House has rejected six different bills to raise the gas tax for the first time since 1996, generating dollars specifically for road repairs. The gas tax is hardly perfect: It's a regressive tax that hits working-class Idahoans the hardest, and the tax grows less effective with every new hybrid that hits the highway. But at least it is a narrow tax tied to road use, a tax that logically applies to road maintenance.

The House Republicans' last-ditch plan ties back to an ill-advised notion that had gained traction long before this 105-day traffic jam of a legislative session. Some lawmakers have toyed with taking the sales tax from car purchases and auto parts purchases and applying it to roadwork.

On Friday, in between meetings with House GOP leaders, Otter was clearly lukewarm to setting this precedent. He wondered aloud, for instance, whether the sales tax from a box of shotgun shells would go to the Department of Fish and Game (another state agency that receives no general fund dollars). "It conjures up potential problems," he told reporters.

The last thing lawmakers should do, at the end of an unimpressive session, is create more problems for themselves.

House Republicans have tossed out a lot of ideas designed to dodge another gas tax vote - and to appease Otter, who has vetoed 35 bills in a pointed call to action on the road repair issue.

The Republicans have put together a mixed bag. They want to take another run at repealing a flawed 2 1/2-cent ethanol tax credit, a good policy move that also puts some money into roadwork. Several proposed fee increases deserve a look.

But a shift from the general fund is a nonstarter - at any juncture of the legislative session.

"Our View" is the editorial position of the Idaho Statesman. It is an unsigned opinion expressing the consensus of the Statesman's editorial board.