Predictions of Things to Come 
By Martin Harris 

In a New Year all Fourth Estaters, even amateurs like your humble scribe, are expected  to make forecasts of future events; in the ‘50’s, a radio program entitled Predictions of Things to Come competed with newsprint to do just that. In that tradition, here’s my prediction: a tax-revenue-desperate Vermont will find a new profit center on the dashboard of your automobile; more precisely, in the odometer. This isn’t a brainstorm on my part: it’s already in place or on the way in States like Oregon and North Carolina. The official reasoning for the new levy derives from the pressing fiscal need to penalize the driving public for doing exactly what they had been instructed by government to do: switch to higher-mileage vehicles and drive fewer miles. Both actions, of course, reduce the inflow of conventional fuel-tax dollars to State coffers.

You won’t have a mileage cop in your vehicle with you, most likely; you will have a mileage-reading device installed so that your driving habits can be recorded and paid for, either with a billing device at every fuel pump so you’ll pay up each time you fill up; or, you might just get an annual bill, in an annual-vehicle-inspection State, based on the mileage numbers you send in each year with your vehicle-inspection results. The mileage-police would descend on you, should you attempt to defeat either of these mileage-recording systems.

If you conceive of the present fuel tax as a sort of user fee; if you recognize that funds need to come from somewhere for highway maintenance; if you don’t want all roads to become toll roads; and if you agree with the concept of user fees being more "fair" and logical than broad-based taxes; you should welcome rather than oppose a highway trust fund revenue source based on measured vehicle miles-usage rather than, say, another grasping hand molesting the income tax treasure-chest.

There are, of course, potholes in the road to user fees, as illustrated by Montpelier’s previous dips into what was supposed to be a lock-box highway trust fund dedicated solely to specific highway spending targets; but such misbehaviors with revenues are always possible under Vermont’s Golden Dome. Assuming such grabs can be kept in check, (and that user fees substitute for, and don’t add onto, general taxes) a policy move towards user fees for essential government services should be welcomed by taxpayers rather than resisted. I wouldn’t go so far as to argue that jail residents should be nominally billed for room and board (although I can conceive of a means-test compromise) but I would suggest that the user fee approach be extended into another tax-heavy area: public education.

If you assume (unlikely but heavily argued in some political circles) that Vermont public education is "under-funded" then you might, in your never-ending search for more money, consider a nominal user fee: that parents or guardians actually pay a few percent of the per-pupil costs incurred by the student(s) they send to school. Back to the future, you might say: the so-called student rate bills of the Civil War era were based on exactly that principle, with the local governments picking up the tab for those few households which couldn’t afford even that nominal contribution.

And while we’re at it, how about impact fees for new development? Like rate bills, not a new concept: places like Stuart, Florida, have been using them successfully for decades. Politically, such a user-fee concept –after all, the impact charge is passed through by the developer to the actual building occupant—should appeal to the anti-development folks; in most cases, I’d guess, the same people who would loudly condemn user fees in an education context are the same ones who would loudly applaud it in a development concept. And that would be fun to watch. If there were a radio figure (subjunctive contrary to fact) like John Nesbitt around today, it could even be discussed on his Passing Parade program.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights