Steve Novick’s Gas Tax is “Regressive and Unnecessary”

Says Fred Stewart, “I see a pattern.”

Fred Stewart, candidate for City Council, announced today his opposition to the ten-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax proposed by Steve Novick, his opponent in the primary election on May 17.

Stewart said, “The time is long past due for the City of Portland to adopt a ‘Fix it First’ approach to our city streets.”

“The truth is,” Stewart asserted, “that Commissioner Novick has demonstrated a less-than-common-sense approach to maintenance of our city streets. He is, after all, charged with running the Portland Bureau of Transportation. The Bureau has a budget of $325 million in the current fiscal year. The Bureau has 750 employees, including 95 engineers, and a personnel budget of $50 million. Yet, despite this huge operation and budget, Novick has budgeted only $8 million this year for repaving city streets. Common sense dictates that the City re-prioritize the budget to ‘Fix It First’ before we consider any kind of tax increase.”

Stewart added that, “Steve Novick has been looking for more money for transportation projects by saying the City couldn’t afford to catch up on its repairs because it has under-spent on repairs in past years. But the truth is, in the three years that Novick has run the Bureau, he has chosen to under-spend on repairs when he clearly didn’t have to do so, given the size of the Bureau budget.”

“Moreover,” Stewart said, “Novick spent a couple of years promoting his regressive street fee to give us more transportation money for pet projects like the freight projects on Columbia Blvd. and on the South Waterfront, each of which are priced at $10 million. He didn’t even plan to take his big new street fee to Portland’s voters, but the rest of City Council wouldn’t go along with him. And then he waited in hopes that the State Legislature would fill the City’s transportation coffers, which, of course, it didn’t do.”

“I see the gas tax and the street fee as extensions of the same failed policy–trying to fund our street repairs without first addressing how we allocate our existing funds. Like the street fee, the gas tax is regressive and unnecessary. And it’s guaranteed to be passed on to Portland consumers and small businesses.”

Stewart further remarked, “I would point out that, of the additional $64 million this Novick gas tax will provide over four years, some $28 million would not be spent on maintenance, but on more of his pet projects so he could raise more campaign money from the building trades and highway contractors.”

“I see a pattern,” Stewart added. “This gasoline tax will hurt the locally-owned Portland gas stations because many of the users of our city streets will choose to buy gas outside of the city limits in order to avoid the tax. This is just like the back-room meeting Novick engineered to pay his boss, Mark Wiener, for lobbying for Uber, a multi-billion-dollar corporation. This deal hurt the locally-owned taxi cab companies and their drivers, just as the gas tax will hurt our gas stations and truck stops.”

“When Portlanders go the polls,” Stewart said, “they need to remember what Steve Novick said when his street fee proposal was challenged. He said, and I quote, ‘If people don’t like what I do, they can vote me out.’ That may just be the best idea he’s had yet.”

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