KIMT NEWS 3 – A transportation bill in the Minnesota legislature is making headway, getting the OK from the House.
It includes a hike in Minnesota’s gas tax, bringing up a variety of opinions.
Gov. Tim Walz said it’s the fix to the state’s crumbling roads and bridges.
That’s a point some Minnesotans agree with.
“If you don't have good roads then you'll be fixing your cars too in the long term,” Abdigani Mohamed, of Rochester, said.
While others want to avoid seeing numbers peak at the pump.
“Because we've gone so long they want an instant fix,” Kevin Holz, of Oronoco, said, “but it can't happen that way when you've gone years without putting in the funds.”
Right now, Minnesota’s state gas tax is 28.5 cents per gallon.
Combine that with the federal gas tax of 18.4 cents, the total tax on gas in Minnesota is 47 cents a gallon.
That amount does fall lower than the national average of 52.64 cents a gallon, but could increase a nickel a year for four years with the proposed gas tax hike.
Whether or not that will be enough is in question for some taxpayers.
“They always want more regardless of what we give them,” Holz said. “It's just not in our state, it's across the nation. We pay taxes, very high taxes and then everybody else wants more. It's kind of a one-way street – up, up, up, up.”
The bill now heads to the Republican-senate, where it will face a decided uphill battle.
