INDIANAPOLIS — As lawmakers search for more money for highways, local officials are hoping for an infusion, too.
An ambitious plan to hike gas taxes and other vehicle-related fees, including highway tolls, could mean millions of dollars more for cities, towns and counties that have fallen behind in fixing aging roads.
Divvying up the dollars could help make the gas-tax plan more palatable to the public, since about 80 percent of the state’s roads are maintained locally.
“People want to know, ‘Is this going to fix my street, or the road I drive on to get to work, or the road the bus that my child takes to get to school?’” said Brian Gould, government affairs director for the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns.
The answer is maybe.
On Wednesday, House Republicans unveiled a plan to raise big revenue needed to fix, maintain and expand highways and interstates. Those state roads and bridges need about $1.2 billion a year for the next 20 years.
But communities that maintain more than 66,000 miles of streets and roads need an additional $700 million a year to repair their own infrastructure, according to study released last month by Purdue University’s road engineering experts.
Some of that local money could come from the increase in the gas tax, which Republicans are proposing to hike from 18 cents a gallon to 28 cents.
Under current law, most gas tax revenue is split between the state, which gets 53 percent, and local governments, which get the rest.
The GOP-backed legislation filed Wednesday doesn’t include that detail of how new revenue will be shared, and the plan’s author, Rep. Ed Soliday, R-Valparaiso, said it’s still in negotiation.
The legislation does include an additional $15 fee tacked onto license plate fees.
The $90 million raised by that increase would go into a matching grant program set up last year that requires a 50 percent match from communities to leverage state money for road repairs.
The fund helped fix nine miles of crumbling streets in Lebanon last year, or about 10 percent of the paved roads under the city’s control.
More than half Lebanon’s 90 miles of streets are rated in “poor” condition by engineers, but the city could only afford to repair about two miles of streets per year before the grant was created, said Mayor Matt Gentry.
“Having dedicated funds is critical for us to make the investments back in our communities,” he said.
It’s especially critical, say advocates for local governments, because property tax caps are expect to squeeze $88 million more from local coffers in the next fiscal year.
The plan filed Wednesday has miles to go before a final vote. Given that this is a budget-making year for lawmakers, it could be April before that decision is made.
And it has plenty of moving parts. In addition to increases in gas taxes and registration fees, the bill includes higher fees for trucks using state roads and the potential for interstate tolls.
It requires the state to ask the federal government for a waiver to collect interstate tolls, possibly raising between $500 million and $1 billion in new funds.