Senator: You break roads, you buy ’em

By J. Patrick Coolican

Thursday, April 9, 2009 | 2 a.m.

In the closing days of the 2007 Legislature, state Sen. Bob Coffin stood in the well of the upper chamber and made a memorable speech condemning the Senate for not taxing the trucking industry to build and fix roads.

“How are you going to build any roads if you do not raise taxes?” he said. “Now, you defeat an amendment earlier that would have at least brought some of the people who do the most damage to the roads to the table,” he said, referring to the trucking industry.

“But, the table, it turns out, did not exist. It was not round. It was not square. It was invisible.”

Finally, he said of his friends in the trucking industry, “How they can snooker you, I do not know.”

This was Coffin at his most Coffin-esque — entertaining, impassioned, maybe even a little insightful, but as a member of the then Democratic minority, powerless.

Suddenly, though, it’s 2009, and Coffin’s party is in power. He is chairman of the Senate Taxation Committee.

So today he’ll hear testimony on a 12-cent-per-gallon tax on diesel fuel, which is aimed squarely at the truckers. He’ll also push for a study of what’s called a weight-distance tax, which would hit trucks hardest, with the goal of eventually implementing it.

“The analysis for the past 25 years is that trucks do the damage you would expect from such heavy vehicles,” Coffin said in an interview Wednesday. Coffin cites a recent study commissioned by the Nevada Transportation Department and completed by Battelle, a consulting firm.

The study computes the ratio between what a certain vehicle class pays in taxes and the cost it incurs on roads. According to the study, the biggest trucks pay 30 percent of what they consume, and passenger vehicles contribute 137 percent.

“There’s no equity,” Coffin said.

If you mention Coffin and the truckers in Carson City, another name immediately comes to mind: Paul Enos, who heads the Nevada Motor Transport Association, e.g., the truckers.

When Coffin talks about the truckers, he means Enos.

“They hid behind his skirts,” he said of the truckers and Enos.

Enos disputes the data in the Battelle study, saying it wildly overestimates the money passenger vehicles pay for roads and thus throws off the ratio.

(Reed Gibby, chief analysis engineer for the Nevada Transportation Department, acknowledged the discrepancy and said he’d asked Battelle to recalibrate. Still, Gibby said, “The trucking industry doesn’t pay as much as other vehicles.”)

Enos, like Coffin, is an amiable warrior, often smiling and laughing at the arguments of his opponents.

He comes armed. Currently, just four states have a weight-distance tax, he said.

About 15 states have higher diesel fuel taxes than Nevada’s $0.2781, though a 12-cent increase would move Nevada near the top.

Because Nevada doesn’t manufacture many goods or grow food, nearly 90 percent of all freight arrives in Nevada by truck. Higher taxes on trucks means higher prices for food, medicine and construction materials, Enos said.

“What can the state of Nevada do to encourage long-term economic growth, diversification of our economy and private investment? This doesn’t send the right kind of message.”

Enos and his team were on their way to meet with Coffin on Wednesday afternoon.

“He thinks he’s doing his job, and I’m doing mine,” Enos said. “You can’t take this stuff personally. If you do, you’re in the wrong business.”

As for whether Coffin, often known for quixotic battles, can succeed, Enos added, “I never underestimate anyone in this building.”