Unanticipated Gas Tax Money IsLikely to Spark New Highway Fight

WASHINGTON (AP) — Carefree American drivers and their sport-utility vehicles are guzzling cheap gas at the pumps, and that's having an extra payoff for the federal government: up to $1.5 billion in unanticipated fuel tax collections.

No matter how low the price of gas goes, drivers still pay their local, state and federal governments an average of 43 cents per gallon in taxes. The federal share is 18.4 cents, and the Clinton administration and the Republican-controlled Congress are already fighting over what to do with this revenue bonanza.

Under the nation's new $203 billion highway bill, gas tax revenues were split 80/20 between highway and mass transit programs. Any unanticipated money was supposed to be restricted to highway construction, traffic reduction and air quality improvements.

ut with some $25 billion already in the pipeline for highway construction projects, the new Transportation Department budget outlines a different way to divvy up the $1.456 billion in extra gas tax revenues the administration now expects:

$730 million for road construction, congestion reduction and air quality improvements.
$291 million for mass transit.
$250 million for surface transportation research.
$125 million for National Highway Traffic Safety Administration safety programs.
$35 million for rail programs, including grade-crossing eliminations.
$25 million for a transportation preservation program.

That would mean roughly 50 percent being spent in ways other than those outlined in the highway bill.

"We are proposing to direct those resources to programs that we think are strategic and are in keeping with the overall needs identified by the administration, where we focus on investments in the environment, safety, technology and the like," Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater said Monday during a briefing on the department's $45.5 billion budget.

Republicans were quick to complain.

"Instead of each transportation program receiving a proportional increase as was agreed to in the law, the president seeks to steer gas taxes away from flexible state programs to

rograms run by federal bureaucrats," said Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

It appeared that Congress and the administration had put their highway budget battles behind them — at least for the next six years — when President Clinton signed the "Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century" in June.

The largest transportation bill in the country's history, it allocated $167 billion to improve, widen and extend the nation's highway system through 2003. It also budgeted $36 billion for improving mass transit systems.

A hallmark of the bill was a provision requiring the government to spend all future gas tax collections on transportation projects. That was a major shift from past policy, where a portion of the receipts was held and used to reduce the size of the overall

overnment budget deficit.