MARTA made gains during the legislative session, but the transportation spending bill will cost the Atlanta transit agency around $2 million a year.
The revenue hit comes from House Bill 170’s tax increase on diesel fuel and the $300 fee on alternative-fuel vehicles, MARTA spokesman Lyle Harris told InsiderAdvantage Georgia. However, the transit agency will not be affected by the legislation’s fees on heavy vehicles, which city and county governments and school boards will have to pay. MARTA’s fiscal year 2015 budget is $415.6 million for operations and $470.1 million for capital programs.
MARTA operates 158 full size “clean diesel” buses and 347 “clean fuel” compressed natural gas buses, according to a transit agency fact sheet. The CNG buses, which reduce carbon monoxide by 95 percent, are subject to the $300 per vehicle alternative fuel fee, which also targets electric vehicles. The fee is $200 for non-commercial vehicles.
Other transit agencies running diesel buses will also have to pay more, along with school boards, whose fuel tax exemption will end when the legislation takes effect July 1. Gov. Nathan Deal is expected to sign the bill soon.
HB 170 will combine the current 7.5 cent per gallon fuel excise tax and 4 percent sales tax into a single fuel excise tax, 26 cents for gasoline and 29 cents for diesel. Motorists paid 19.3 cents per gallon on gasoline and 21.3 cents per gallon for diesel in 2014, according to Wesley Tharpe, senior policy analyst for the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.
House Transportation Committee Chairman Rep. Jay Roberts, R-Ocilla, the bill’s author, and other legislative leaders expressed support during the session for mass transit, but the legislation doesn’t include dedicated funding for buses and rail. However, the legislation’s $5 per night hotel and motel fee and heavy vehicle fees could be used for transit. The Georgia Constitution doesn’t allow fuel taxes to be spent for trains and buses.
Environmental groups say the alternative fuel fees are proportionally much higher than the fuel excise tax. Tharpe in his analysis says the $200 fee for noncommercial alternative fuel vehicles “is more than double what the average Georgia driver pays in gas taxes.”
Roberts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he used some “fuzzy math” to come up with the alternative-fuel fees. Roberts told the AJC he took the 12,000 average number of miles driven per year, as reported to insurance companies, and doubled that figure because he believes the higher number more accurate. He then calculated fuel taxes on 24,000 miles, coming up with $175, and rounded the total to $200.
HB 170 also removes the $5,000 tax credit for electric vehicles, along with Delta Air Lines’ tax exemption for motor fuel. Ending the airline tax break will add $20 million a year to state revenues, while removing the electric vehicle benefit will save an estimated $66 million in 2016 and possibly as much as $187 a year by 2020, Tharpe said.
Those new revenues will go into the state’s general fund, meaning legislators would have to dedicate them to transportation in future budgets if desired, Tharpe said. The exemptions will help make up for $170 million removed from the general budget in the conversion of the gas sales tax to the fuel excise tax. The switch gives the DOT the so-called fourth penny of gas sales tax revenues now going to the general budget.
MARTA ’s increased payments to the state come after the Legislature voted to permanently remove the requirement that the transit agency spend 50 percent of its revenues on operations and 50 percent on infrastructure.
The legislation removing the spending restrictions, a longtime MARTA priority, also briefly included an amendment passed in the Senate to allow the transit agency to ask voters to raise its sales tax from 1 percent to 1.5 percent. The agency sought the additional funds to extend MARTA’s rail line farther into Fulton County along the Georgia 400 corridor. But opposition in the House, including from Democratic members, led to the amendment’s removal.
MARTA is enjoying increased metro area acceptance. The transit agency recently began bus service in Clayton County, and a recent poll released by the Gwinnett County Chamber of Commerce showed 63 percent of of likely voters support MARTA expanding into the county. But only 50 percent said they would approve a 1 percent sales tax for the expansion.
