Daily Herald opinion: An appropriate mission: Lawmakers are wise to seek balance between EVs’ benefits and road maintenance

Assigning costs that distribute the tax load fairly among all the vehicle types and beneficiaries of a well-maintained system of roads and highways is a numbers game that can easily be complicated to suit the desires of whatever interest is paying the tax.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t try, of course. But it is an important starting point when examining the contributions electric vehicles are making to the system.

EV owners in Illinois already pay a $100-a-year additional registration fee intended partially to close the gap compared to what owners of gasoline-powered vehicles pay in fuel taxes for road maintenance. But it doesn’t require a Ph.D. in mathematics to recognize that that $100 is a far cry from the EVs’ fare share of the costs of maintaining the roads on which they ride.

What is closer? The $320-a-year additional surcharge proposed in new legislation Chicago Democrat Ram Villivalam introduced in the state Senate is at least a reasonable place to start. Villivalam’s bill includes a provision allowing modifications allowing vehicles that don’t use the roads often to pay less based on their mileage.

The numbers must surely be open to debate, but the concept is reasonable and deserves serious study by lawmakers this session.

“Electric vehicles are our future,” Villivalam, the Senate Transportation Committee chair, said in our Marni Pyke’s “In Transit” column Monday, “ensuring we are reducing our environmental impact while connecting people with where they need to go. Regular vehicles already pay a tax to contribute to road funding when paying for gasoline — it’s appropriate that EV owners pay their share.”

And St. Charles Republican Sen. Don DeWitte essentially echoed that call.

“The nexus of the bill is appropriate in that I think it’s important for legislators to find ways to ensure electric vehicles are paying their fair share of the burden,” he said, although acknowledging, also reasonably, that the devil is in the details of what qualifies as a fair share.

Certain interests were quick to lash out at the bill. Susan Mudd, senior policy advocate for the pro-EV Environmental Law and Policy Center called it “very punitive” and claimed it would “put Illinois into the company of the most anti-EV states in the nation.”

Even if Mudd has data to support that broad statement, it seems the kind of narrow view that fails to recognize what Illinois would be compared against and the degree to which other states may or may not be coming to grips with the foundational notion that EVs, for all the many benefits they offer drivers and the environment, must contribute adequately to the maintenance of the roads they use.

And Sycamore Republican Rep. Jeffrey Keicher’s dismissive response that he is “always troubled by additional tax schemes Democrats propose,” seems to disregard the practical notions of equity and basic needs altogether in favor of simple partisan cynicism.

There are legitimate arguments for encouraging the advance of electric vehicles, and finding ways to do that while ensuring a long-term system to sustain them amid the needs of the state’s transportation system is hardly an underhanded “scheme.” Lawmakers are wise to be seeking an effective balance. They may have to work through a complex web of numerical proposals and cost-benefit assumptions to find it, but the search is both valid and timely.