After long offering some of the lowest gas taxes in the Southwest, New Mexico is considering an increase on each gallon at the pump, a tactic that doesn’t sit well with many residents.
The New Mexico Sun conducted a poll between Nov. 25 and Dec. 8 asking if people support higher gas taxes, and more than half (56.5%) of the 1,001 respondents said no, while just 14.8% responded yes. The others who were surveyed said they were unsure.
“We have some of the lowest gas taxes in the region, and they’ve been that way since the 1980s,” State Sen. Michael Padilla (D-Albuquerque) said on nmpoliticalreport.com. “As a result, we’re taking a serious look at what we do with the gas tax because that is where this large chunk of money can come from.”
Lawmakers broached the idea in Senate Bill 168, introduced near the beginning of the year. The bill currently is with the Senate Finance Committee.
It calls for increasing the tax to 22 cents per gallon, up from the current rate of 17 cents per gallon. The increase would come in one-cent increments over five years.
The state last raised the gas tax in 1993, when it went to 22 cents per gallon from 16 cents per gallon. The rate has been pared back in the years since.
But lawmakers today are saying a higher gas tax is a good way to bring the quality of the state’s highways up a notch.
“Our roads at the moment are a complete disaster, and we do need to take it seriously,” Padilla, who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Tax, Business and Transportation Committee, said in the nmpoliticalreport.com story.
Despite the push to raise the rate, a budget evaluation recently indicated that an additional $1.6 billion in revenue came from the oil and gas industry this year, creating a budget surplus in the state, according to the Carlsbad Current Argus.
“While the governor is busy positioning herself as a pro-business ‘tax cutter,’ she is also pushing a new ‘Clean Fuel Standard’ that, based on a draft of the bill, would increase gasoline prices by 35 cents per gallon,” Paul Gessing, president of the Rio Grande Foundation, wrote for the Los Alamos Daily Post. “Every New Mexico business and resident (even if they drive an electric vehicle) would see further price hikes above and beyond current inflation if that bill becomes law."
Kob.com reported that gas prices in October reached a seven-year high, already causing drivers to dig deeper into their pockets at the pump. And the nation is in the grips of an inflation rate of 6.8%, a level not seen in almost 40 years, leading critics to say a higher gas tax would be onerous.