Higher Truck Fees Accepted as Part of Huge Transit Plan

State leaders, adding the final touches to a mammoth transportation improvement plan that includes a gasoline tax increase, agreed late Monday to more than double trucking fees over the next decade.

Negotiators for the Legislature and Gov. George Deukmejian said the truck weight fee increases had been the only major detail left to be worked out in a 10-year, $18.5-billion program for upgrading the state’s highways and transit systems.

Also agreed to by the negotiators, said Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), was a plan to permit private companies to build and finance three toll-road projects in California. The proposal allows the California Department of Transportation to enter agreements with private companies to construct transportation projects and permits the businesses to impose a toll to recover the project costs and earn a profit.

Katz said Democrats endorsed the toll-road plan with the understanding that the Deukmejian Administration will reach an agreement with the state’s labor unions that prevailing wage laws will apply to those projects.

The transportation program, which calls for a 9-cent-a-gallon increase in the gasoline tax, is contingent upon voters approving modifications in the state spending limit. If the spending limit is not modified, the state could not spend the additional revenue raised by the transportation plan.

Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco) said the plan accepted by the negotiators for increasing truck fees was recommended by the California Trucking Assn. after lawmakers advised the industry that it would have to provide $2 billion for the transportation improvement program. He said industry leaders were asked for recommendations on the best way to raise the truck weight fees.

Raises in Stages

The proposal adopted by the negotiators provides for an initial 15% increase to be followed by a 20% hike in 1993, 40% in 1996 and another 40% in 1999.

“I really believe that all that’s left to be done on the transportation plan is literally a matter of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s,” said Katz, who is chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee.

Both Katz and Kopp said Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), who opposes toll roads, agreed not to block the plan’s passage in the Senate.

The transportation plan is the first of a series of politically sensitive budget agreements to be worked out by the administration and legislative leaders. Still to be resolved by other negotiators are the spending limit modification and a dispute over the distribution of any state surplus funds.