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Community meetings on Maui for the HiRUC (Hawaii Road Usage Charge) for Lahaina on
Other Maui Locations:
MOLOKAI
Full Press Release below has Statewide listing for Community Meetings. Full Press Release (as copied below) Source: hidot.hawaii.gov/blog/2019/03/12/community-meetings-scheduled-for-input-on-potential-road-usage-charge-for-hawaii/ COMMUNITY MEETINGS SCHEDULED FOR INPUT ON POTENTIAL ROAD USAGE CHARGE FOR HAWAIIPosted on Mar 12, 2019 in Highways News, Main, NewsOnline community presentation also being held April 18, 2019
HONOLULU – The Hawaii Department of Transportation (HDOT) will hold 14 community meetings across the state to get public feedback on the concept of a road usage charge (RUC) to fund upkeep of roadways and bridges. Community meetings are currently scheduled for the following dates and times: OAHU
“The reality is fuel tax revenue, which provides a third of state highways funding, continues to decrease as cars become more fuel efficient,” said Ed Sniffen, HDOT deputy director for Highways. “We need to look at a long-term replacement for the gas tax that is sustainable and fair to all road users.” In an RUC system, vehicle owners pay for actual miles driven versus a gasoline tax system where owners pay by the amount of fuel their vehicle consumes. Hawaii is one of a dozen states including California and Oregon that is investigating whether the switch to a pay-per-mile-driven charge is feasible and how it might be implemented. Hawaii’s study looks at a RUC system as a revenue neutral replacement to the current 16 cents per gallon state fuel tax. As a part of this study, important factors such as sustainability, fairness, information and privacy protection, and other topics will be addressed. The scheduled meetings are important to share information with Hawaii residents about road usage charges and gather community feedback. About HiRUC The Hawaii Road Usage Charge Demonstration is a three-year project to investigate the use of a per-mile fee to fund upkeep of roads and bridges instead of a system where drivers pay at the pump. The demonstration will allow Hawaii drivers to experience what a road usage charge (RUC) system could be like and provide their feedback, opinions, questions, and concerns to Hawaii Department of Transportation. More information is available on the website at www.hiruc.org
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To view the archives of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii's commentary click here. Weekly Commentary For the Week of March 17, 2019 Blank the Amount, Defect the Date? By Tom Yamachika, President If you’re following bills as they move through our legislature, there are a couple of practices that we need you to know about. Often, committee chairs will refer to one or both of these practices when they move bills forward. Each bill must have an effective date so that we know when it starts doing what it is supposed to if it’s signed into law. Typically, income tax bills become effective for tax years beginning after a certain date. Excise tax bills usually become effective on July 1st to coincide with the start of the State’s fiscal year. “Defect the date” refers to setting the effective date very far in the future, such as July 1, 2050, so the bill would have no effect if enacted into law in that form. A bill with such an effective date is still alive, but the legislators are not comfortable enough with it to let it pass in that form. Instead, they are willing to let the bill survive for now “so that the discussion can continue,” but they want to take a look at it again, perhaps in conference committee, before deciding whether to send the bill to the Governor’s desk. “Blank the amount” is a similar technique that can be used whenever a bill has a number in it. The technique is often used on an appropriation bill that sets aside a certain amount of money to do what the bill proponents want. It can also be used to earmark tax revenues, as is done with SB 1474 Senate Draft 2 that proposes an increase in the GET. The bill now specifies that “__ per cent or $ _____, whichever is greater, of the revenues shall be deposited into a special account in the general fund for appropriation to and expenditure for operations of the department of education.” A similar clause is provided for operations of the University of Hawaii. Obviously, bills with blank amounts in them won’t have much of an effect if they are enacted in that form, even if they have an effective date that is not defective. (We actually enacted such a bill in 1999. Act 306 of 1999 enacted credits for the construction or renovation of a “qualified resort facility” and a “qualified general facility.” The credit amounts were percentages of the capitalized costs but were left blank. The Department then refused to allow any credit under these circumstances, as it explained in Department of Taxation Announcement No. 99-27.) Bills with blank amounts perhaps serve the same purpose as bills with defective effective dates, but the blank amounts are quite a bit more problematic. First, it’s easy to imagine that what goes in the blank will have a difference in our lawmakers’ willingness to vote for the bill. A lawmaker who might be willing to stomach an increase in the base GET rate from 4% to 4.5%, for example, might be outraged enough to hit the “No” button if the bill’s proponents wanted to fill in the blank with 7%. Next, the Department of Taxation normally calculates the revenue impact of a tax or credit bill, because that information is important to lawmakers. If such a bill has a blank amount in it, it would be easy for the Department economists to throw up their hands and say, “We have no idea! Obviously, it would depend on what you guys put in the blank.” It is common for the defective dates to be fixed, and for the blank amounts to be filled in, when a bill pops out of conference committee. At that point, of course, the deal is done and there is no opportunity for public hearings or testimony. The public can still weigh in on the process by contacting individual legislators in hopes of swaying their votes on the floor, but for many of us that seems to be a waste of effort. Can the system be improved? We hope so! WMTA Shares these commentaries, without taking a position unless otherwise noted, to bring information to our readers
To view the archives of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii's commentary click here. Weekly Commentary For the Week of March 10, 2019 Can’t You Spare Half a Penny for Education? By Tom Yamachika, President “Friends! Romans! Countrymen! We desperately need to lift our public schools and our namesake university into the 21st Century. Senate Bill 1474 will do this by a teensy little increase of half a percent to our general excise tax (“GET”), and by establishing two special funds for the Department of Education and the University of Hawaii that will give a dedicated funding source for these fine departments charged with the heavy responsibility of educating our students. Isn’t that a small price to ask for the future of our keiki?” That speech was made up, but the bill was not. The speech is a summary of what many of the bill’s supporters are testifying in support of it. As of this writing, the bill is very much alive and headed over from the Senate to the House of Representatives. There’s no mistaking that we have problems in our school system. When school officials are reduced to going to their local neighborhood boards to beg for spare change to buy pencils when the overall budget of the Department of Education is in the billions of dollars, something is seriously wrong with the system we now have. Why is it that the multiple management layers that stand between the appropriated king’s ransom and the classrooms allow so little to filter through? And why aren’t we making the effort to pull down available federal funds, as we have written about before? Shouldn’t we be trying to address these problems before putting an even heavier monkey on the backs of our working families? (And, make no mistake, this monkey weighs more heavily on those least able to afford it. We and others have written on several occasions that the GET is regressive, meaning that those with the least ability to pay are hurt the most.) Can the life of our teachers and professors be improved with a “dedicated funding source”? That argument is a smelly red herring. As we said during the debate over the failed constitutional amendment to surcharge real property taxes, our educational institutions already receive a ton of general fund money. Adding a special fund won’t and can’t prevent either this or a future legislature from redirecting those general fund moneys to other pressing needs. Floods on Kauai? Lava devastation on the Big Island? Money for relief from those natural disasters has to come from somewhere. And then there are the other problems like cost of living, the homeless, invasive species, and the list goes on. Big, fat special funds would make oversight of how the money is spent tougher and would lessen accountability even more. And, as we wrote about before, for more than twenty years our legislature shoveled $90 million a year into an “educational facilities special fund.” That fund was in existence between 1990 and 2013. At the beginning of this year, DOE’s maintenance backlog was found to be a whopping $868 million, while that of UH wasn’t far behind with $722 million. Did the backlog swell to that level in just the last 5-6 years? If not, let’s stop thinking that a special fund will be a cure-all. Instead, what we really need to do is fix the inefficiency – whatever is causing the “trickle-out economics” that causes the staggering sums our legislature throws at our educational institutions to be reduced to peanuts by the time it reaches the classrooms. This fix will not be easy. There will be pain. Those whose actions have caused or perpetuated these disasters deserve some head-rolling, and hopefully some of that will happen. |
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