Electric vehicle owners likely to lose out in Georgia’s transportation plan

• Joeff Davis/CL File
• TAKING CHARGE: A group of electric cars charges at a parking lot across from the capitol.

As state lawmakers wrap up the 2015 legislative session this week, the road to addressing Georgia’s $1 billion transportation funding gap is still unclear. Two road-centric proposals won’t offer funding for transit. And the final bill will likely hurt electric-car owners who have recently benefitted from tax credits.

A six-member committee committee is currently weighing two different versions of House Bill 170. Transportation proposals from both the Georgia House of Representatives and the Georgia Senate would boost funds by eliminating the state’s gas sales tax and replacing it with an excise tax. How each plan raises funds is what’s now being debated. House lawmakers are pushing for a 29.2 cents per gallon excise tax, while the state senators would like a 24 cent per gallon excise tax and a $5 daily rental car fee.

But lawmakers in both chambers have found common ground on one issue: electric vehicles. Both measures are calling for an end to a generous tax credit that has driven Atlanta’s extraordinary boom in electric cars, and slap them with a $200 registration fee as well. Drivers of commercial electric vehicles would be forced to pay a $300 annual fee.

Climate-change and energy-independence activists bemoan the proposed changes. Don Francis, coordinator of the alternative-fuel advocacy program Clean Cities-Georgia, tells Creative Loafing there’s no sign of compromise on the electric-vehicle smackdown. He shepherded a coalition that filed a compromise bill that would have broadened the tax credit to include hybrids, while lowering the credit amount and eventually phasing it out. But that bill never got a vote, nor did a bill from Rep. Chuck Martin, R-Alpharetta, proposing to only kill the tax credit.

“That vote was never allowed to happen,” said Francis, adding that leadership likely preferred the credit-killing be “buried” within the transportation bill it would go unnoticed.

What’s the worst part for Georgia’s electric vehicle owners? The transportation bill would kill the gas sales tax. But electric-vehicle owners, who are still subject to sales tax on electricity, take a disproportionate hit. Francis blasted the $200 electric-vehicle fee as “punitive,” far higher than what most gas-car owners would pay in comparable taxes.

According to Francis, who calculated the excise tax that owners of various types of gasoline-powered cars would pay under the lowest-priced form of the transportation bill, a gas-guzzling SUV that gets 15 miles per gallon, driven the same 7,500 miles per year as Francis’s Nissan Leaf electric car, would pay only $120 in excise tax. A standard-sized car would pay around $77 and a Toyota Prius electric-gas hybrid would pay around $36. A $200 fee, Francis says, is basically taxing an electric car as if it were a 9-mile-per-gallon gas car.

Electric-vehicle owners won’t be off the hook if a transportation bill fails to pass before Sine Die. If the spending plan doesn’t get approved this week, Gov. Nathan Deal has threatened to call state lawmakers back for a special session to address the transportation spending gap. According to the AJC, Deal wants the final spending plan, whatever it looks like, to include enough cash to adequately address the state’s funding needs.