Lawmaker says no call for gas tax hike
By Matthew Waller
AUSTIN — Fighting news reports, a leading lawmaker on transportation funding asserted he isn’t calling for a fuel tax increase and he does favor straight-forward budgeting.
State Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, said Monday a radio journalist misrepresented him while he spoke to the San Antonio Mobility Coalition as advocating for a gasoline tax hike. The reporter corrected the story.
After the story ran on WOAI-AM’s website, tea party advocate Terri Hall, who specializes in anti-toll road efforts, wrote a blog post for the San Antonio Express-News that attacked Darby for wanting an increase in fuel taxes and disparaging diversions.
“Darby sits on the House Appropriations Committee so he and his fellow budget writers want to increase taxes to make up for the shortfalls rather than discipline the use of the taxes we already send to Austin or cut spending,” Hall wrote.
Hall could not be reached Monday evening for comment.
When money is used for a purpose other than the original intended purpose, such as paying the Texas Department of Public Safety with fuel tax dollars, it is called a diversion.
“I did not call for a gas tax increase nor have I ever ridiculed ending diversions,” Darby said in a release. “This past session, I, along with others in the House, was able to reverse the diversion of $400 million in gas tax dollars that would have otherwise flowed to the Department of Public Safety; securing their needed funding through general revenue dollars instead. Looking forward, I will continue pushing for more state funding that does not rely on debt, tolls, or abandoning the maintenance of Texas roads.”
Darby said he was able to work out a correction from the original report.
Darby’s statement came out “in response to a deliberately false report from a paid political activist that was not in attendance at a speech he gave to the San Antonio Mobility Coalition on March 20, 2014,” the release from his office state’s.
The release said “deliberately false,” Darby’s chief of staff Jason Modglin said, because Hall’s post distorted Darby’s legislation by claiming a bill he supported would have raised gas taxes by 10 cents per gallon and double vehicle registration fees.
The House Appropriations Committee writes the state’s two-year budget, and Darby chaired the subcommittee that handles transportation funding.
The state will need $4 to $5 billion to handle congestion and maintenance and it faces what lawmakers have called a fiscal cliff of highway funding.
A measure on the November ballot could bring in more than $1 billion by redirecting some of the oil and gas money that normally heads to the state’s Rainy Day Fund to transportation.
Darby did propose a measure to raise registration fees in the last legislative session, but it flopped on the House floor and he took the bill down. He said beside the measure not having enough House support, Gov. Rick Perry did not approve of it.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, the Republican candidate for governor, said he plans to address transportation funding without raising taxes if elected, and Monday gubernatorial candidate state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, said “right now we have existing resources to take care of our transportation needs. We simply need to put our priorities in the right place.”
Reprinted with permission from the San Angelo Standard-Times. Original story here.