Fill ‘er Up--Gas Prices Rise 5 Wednesday : Transportation: The voter-approved tax hike will pay for state highway projects. One-cent increases will follow in each of the next four years.

California’s gasoline price, a slave in recent years to fluctuations in crude oil markets and bottlenecks at the nation’s refineries, on Wednesday is going a nickel-a-gallon higher.

But this time neither flighty markets nor overburdened refineries will shoulder the blame. We did it to ourselves.

The increase comes from a voter decision June 5 to approve Proposition 111, a ballot measure that triggered a 9-cent-per-gallon hike in gasoline taxes. Five cents of that increase will go into effect Wednesday. The rest of the increase will be phased in over the next four years with 1-cent tax hikes becoming effective every Jan. 1.

To those who harbor hopes that petroleum retailers or wholesalers will soften the financial blow by absorbing some or all of the increase, the answer from gasoline dealers is emphatic.

“No way,” said John DeWitt, owner of J. E. DeWitt Inc., a gasoline wholesaler in South El Monte who also owns some retail stations. “The delivery costs from the refinery to the station, trucking costs and overhead, so many government rules, regulations and fees make that impossible.”

Jim Gigoux, executive director of the California Independent Oil Marketers Assn., said a few stations may introduce the tax hike gradually but “you can bet in a very short time everybody’s going to be up 5 cents a gallon.”

So on Wednesday most California motorists will see new prices at their corner gas stations. Where the night before self-serve unleaded gas may have sold for $1.08 a gallon, or regular for a bargain 99 cents a gallon, prices will be $1.13 for unleaded and $1.04 for regular.

“You tell me one other industry that has it prices out there in three-foot-high letters on the street,” complained Gigoux. “People complain about $1 a gallon for gasoline but they think nothing of going into the grocery and spending a lot more than that for water in a fancy bottle.”

The tax hike was designed by the Legislature and Gov. George Deukmejian to help finance a 10-year, $18.5-billion transportation program that they hope will ease traffic congestion, repair crumbling highways and bridges and provide better access to rail transit.

For consumers, it means the total federal and state taxes paid on a gallon of gasoline in California will be about 30 cents.

It works out this way: Customers already pay a 9-cent federal tax and a 9-cent state tax. Then there will be the extra nickel as of Wednesday. But California motorists actually pay a tax on a tax in the form of a sales tax, ranging from 6 1/4% to 7 1/4% depending on the area of the state, that is added on top of the state and federal gas taxes.

So in addition to the $5.3 billion in new revenue the state expects to garner from the gas tax hike in the next five years, it will also collect $220 million from its share of the sales tax that is levied on that tax.

While the new tax is expected to produce some grumbling from customers, Gigoux said the real complaints are coming from gasoline distributors who must forward the tax to the State Board of Equalization, the agency responsible for collecting it.

He said the new tax contributes to cash flow concerns because distributors pay the tax before they deliver gasoline, but they may not be paid by the commercial account that receives the delivery for another 10 to 30 days. An additional tax, he said, means that much more they have to carry until payment is made.

“It is an additional strain on an already strained cash flow,” said DeWitt. “The industry is already operating with a lot of trusses and unfortunately when you get another injury, sometimes there aren’t enough trusses to hold it in.”

But neither DeWitt nor Gigoux expect the tax hike to have any effect on the habits of the buying public. “Mom is still going to go play bridge, pop’s going to take the kid to Little League and he’s still going to go to his Saturday golf game,” said Gigoux.

By now, both say, California customers are accustomed to price changes prompted by the rise and fall of crude oil costs and a shortage of refinery capacity that often makes the petroleum processing plants unable to keep pace with demand. While prices have fluctuated over the last few years, American Automobile Assn. surveys show a slight rise in California since Memorial Day.

At the Board of Equalization, officials do not expect any major problems to develop with collections as the new tax increase goes into effect.

“Based on our past experience, we expect it all to go smoothly,” said Delena Bratton, tax service specialist for the board.

The last time the state increased the gas tax was in 1983 when it went up 2 cents, from 7 to 9 cents a gallon.