Gov. Phil Scott’s budget address was larded with the customary straw-man punching. Irritating, predictable, grind your teeth and move on. But one of those throwaway lines implied the abandonment of a policy idea that’s appeared inevitable for quite a long time. See if you can spot it:

…for those looking for a quick and easy fix to the [Transportation Fund] short fall, I want to be crystal clear, I will not support raising the Gas tax.

Okay, first of all, NO ONE is even suggesting, let alone supporting, an increase in the “Gas tax.” I haven’t heard a single person in Vermont politics even mention such a thing. (Leave the straw man alone!)

What I have heard for years, from everyone involved in transportation policy, is that we will need to transition to a broader tax mechanism that includes electric vehicles and hybrids. Cars and trucks are more fuel-efficient than they used to be, and we are embarking on a massive shift away from gas-powered transportation. Gas tax revenues are down and will keep on declining. We’ll still be using the roads, and we’ll still need to pay for their upkeep.

Various ideas have been tossed around. Most involve a miles-driven assessment (clunky acronym MBUF, see below) where you pay based on how much you drive, not how often you get gas.

But the idea was absent from the governor’s presentation, replaced by a boilerplate rejection of an idea that nobody has proposed. Given how he frames every tax reform proposal as a tax increase (because there’s always somebody who might pay more even if the aggregate impact is a tax cut), he’s implicitly signaling his opposition to any kind of transportation tax shift. If the Legislature did approve a new tax regime that properly assessed electrics for their use of the roads and highways, I believe the governor would veto it.

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