Opinion: Time to End Oregon's Weight-Mile Tax Foolishness
Motorists pay for using Oregon highways by a cents-per-mile levy at the fuel pump, plus a token fee for registering a vehicle. By contrast, truck operators pay for highway use by a combination of taxes and fees so complex, so arcane and so Byzantine that a battalion of CPAs armed with a library of statutes and regulations could not possibly unravel it.
At the heart of the mess is an anachronism known as the weight-mile tax. The theory behind this impost seems reasonable enough: Both truck weight and miles traveled are factored in. The bigger the rig and the farther it travels, the more tax it pays.
Fair enough.
Having operated several fleets in both Oregon and Washington, I can attest that expecting each driver to record specific weights for each vehicle combination driven during as many as 20 different dispatches a day is patently absurd. The absurdity is compounded by further expecting the employer to collate each driver’s data with that from every other driver, day after day, and for the resulting flood of numbers to be reported with accuracy to the state.
But that’s only part of the nonsense. Under Oregon law, seven trucks of exactly the same weight, traveling exactly the same highway, will — you guessed it — pay seven different scales of taxes. You and I may not understand it, and the pavements can’t feel it, but the tax differences are determined by who owns the rig and what it’s carrying.
Example: Logs and gravel and wood chips and steel plate are all taxed differently from each other. A farmer pays differently from a lumberman. Tow trucks have their own little category. And even for governmental agencies, there are at least two different categories.
The sheer impossibility of administering this ridiculous mishmash is reflected in a conversation I had with an Oregon Public Utilities Commission agent examining the records at my Portland company in the mid-1980s. I asked him how sure he could be that the trucking company wasn’t underpaying or, in the alternative, how could the company know it wasn’t overpaying? He shook his head and said wearily, “This is like trying to count raindrops in a moving storm.”
Ah, but the state does try. In fact, it tries so hard that it employs 188 more highway tax staffers than does our neighbor to the north, Washington. That’s not 188 total; that’s 188 more than Washington. The payroll to support these extra bean-counters, who spend their days shuffling through tons of paper and computer records, comes to more than $12 million a year.
Keep in mind, that’s highway tax money siphoned off the top. It doesn’t buy paving or bridges or guard rails. It just buys bureaucracy.
And in the end, what do they collect? In the end, these 188 extra staffers, plus the rest of Oregon’s vast array of weight-mile clerks and auditors and collectors and what-not, taken altogether, end up collecting less highway tax money than does Washington’s much slimmer highway tax staff.
The reason is simple. Washington, like 45 other states, doesn’t play the nutty weight-mile tax game.
n the Evergreen State, truckers pay for highway use primarily at the fuel pump.
Ditto California. Ditto Alaska.
Thus a rig hauling cargo from Tijuana, Mexico, to Fairbanks, Alaska, logs about 3,000 miles, but only while crossing Oregon does its operator have to cope with the weight-mile paperwork and tax bureaucracy.
Across the breadth of our country, the deficiencies of the weight-mile tax scheme are so well-recognized that 22 states that have, from time to time, experimented with it have ash-canned it.
Compared with Oregon’s weight-mile impost, the British tea taxes that led to the historic dumping of 1773 were rational and benign. It’s now time for the Oregon Legislature to put on its own dumping party.
2027
