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Show Road Tax Proposal Explained The telephone continues to ring and the voice continues to ask: "Why can't we get something done on State High way 114 from Geneva to Pleas ant Grove? Or State Highway High-way 153 from Beaver to Junction? Junc-tion? Or this state road or that state road?" "We know there is only one answer. The funds available just don't reach far enough." stated Mr. Weston E. Hamilton, Hamil-ton, Chairman, Utah Slate Road Commission. The next question is inevitable. inev-itable. "What do you do with the millions of dollars collected collect-ed from the 6 cents state gasoline gas-oline tax?" This is a good question and deserves an answer. ans-wer. Let's take a look at the first two quarters of this fiscal year. These dates would include in-clude July 1st, 19G7 to December Dec-ember 31, 19G7. 1 From temporary permits, Special Fuel, Motor Fuel and i Special Transportation per-I per-I mils, the Highway Depart-' Depart-' ment received during the a-I a-I bove dates a total of $14,032, I 849.40 Through Legislative allocation alloca-tion under the Constitutional 1 provision of our State statute there was allocated to other state agencies the following amounts of money from this $14,032,849.40: Tax Commission $102,600.00 i Public Safety 1,344,999.00; Attorney At-torney General $30,278,46: State Auditor $10,500.00; State Treasurer $12,297.50; Finance Dept. $316,200.00 and Capitol Building and Grounds 13,750. 00 The Travel Development K59.000.000; a total of $1,889, 624:06. These agencies are all an integral part of our state government gov-ernment and need to be financed. fi-nanced. The question now is: Should it come from the mo- tor fuel tax? i Anyway, "the highway de- partment was left with a balance bal-ance of $12,153,224.56 for its , six months' operation. During Dur-ing this six-months period, i there was expended $5,037,000. 00 for maintenance which was $900,000.00 more than for the same period one year ago. This shows a definite increase in maintenance costs, mainly because we are adding each year, many, many, new miles to our state highway system. It is also important to realize that there is no Federal participation par-ticipation in state highway maintenance. With this huge maintenance cost of more than $5 million, we had left just slightly over $7 million for matching funds for our interstate program, our Primary and Secondary programs and all other highway high-way costs including adm lustration. lus-tration. I You don't have to stretch your imagination very far to : see that we are scratching i the bottom of the barrel in order to stay in business. This is also the big reason why ' many of our state highways I are not receiving the atten- tion they warrant. |