State House passes gas tax cap

RALEIGH—Members of the North Carolina House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill to cap the state’s gas tax at 35 cents per gallon for six months.

But before the ink on the legislation had even dried, state Sen. Bill Rabon, R-Brunswick, accused his colleagues in the House of playing politics with the bill’s passage.

The bill passed its third reading in the House Tuesday afternoon 94 votes to 23 votes, with Brunswick County’s two representatives, Frank Iler, R-Oak Island, and Dewey Hill, D-Whiteville, voting in favor of the measure.

The bill couldn’t cross over to the Senate, Rabon said Tuesday, because the Senate had already adjourned until February when the bill passed the House.

Rabon, who chairs the Senate transportation committee and sits on the Senate transportation appropriations committee, said he offered to help draft a better bill.

“It couldn’t come to the Senate. It’s in the rules and they knew it. It’s nothing but political. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just politics,” Rabon said.

The bill’s passage, Rabon said, was “to allow certain members to use it for political reasons in their primary campaigns.

“I’m not going to play politics. Every single person in that legislature that voted for the budget, every single person that voted for the veto override, knew at the time they voted, knew the budget was based on the projected increase in the gas tax,” Rabon said.

Capping the gas tax, Rabon said, would remove about $95 million in revenue from the state budget, which he equated to 400 miles of paved roads or 72 bridge repair projects.

“Legally, if we take 90-some million dollars out of the state budget, does that open the budget again?” Rabon said.

Iler said some reserve funding could be used, brining the shortfall to about $63 million.

“Everyone knows the projection is it’s going to go up in January and back down in July. Let’s be transparent here. We knew that. Just in October, alone, the budget that we passed and the DOT budget created more than 100 jobs with average salaries of between $70,000 and $120,000,” Rabon said.

With an estimated 82 percent of North Carolina’s bridges past their projected life expectancy or in some sort of disrepair, Rabon said he wasn’t willing to risk a tractor-trailer, school bus or farm equipment accident to say, “I’m sorry, but I needed a vote.”

“All 170 members of the General Assembly knew what was going on. If they wanted to change it, why didn’t they bring it up during session? They knew if they brought it up, they couldn’t get certain votes in the budget, so in the 11th hour, they tried to slap something in that was not supposed to be heard.

“It was not on the adjournment resolution, and they slipped it over and then tried to pull the wool over people’s eyes. That’s wrong. That is wrong. If you’re going to run a state like a business, run it like a business. But this idea of ‘just get me re-elected at any cost,’ that’s just not what the change we wanted was. It’s not about destroying the system. It’s about building a better one. We’ve got the chance to do it right.” Rabon said.

Iler said he voted for the temporary gas tax cap because it’s what his constituents wanted.

“I think the people back home were asking to cap the tax or lower or stop as many taxes as possible,” Iler said.

In the House bill, the gas tax would be capped at its current rate of 35 cents per gallon—which is a 17.5-cent set tax and a 17.5-cent variable tax—for six months.

“Then, we’ll study the whole structure on how we’ll finance road projects. Even with the cap, it would delay some projects 30 to 40 days—projects that had been delayed for years already,” Iler said.

Responding to the argument made on the House floor that bridges would fall if the cap were approved, Iler said legislators have been “robbing the highway trust fund as much as $4 billion the last 15-20 years.”

“If bridges fall it’s not because of a 30- to 40-day delay. It’s because of robbing the highway trust fund for the past two decades.

“Senator Rabon and I are very passionate about funding highways, we just have a slight difference in the way we get to it. But again, unless they vote on it in February, it’s not going to happen anyway,” Iler said.