Jill Carter: The workaround that enabled a gas tax increase that violated the Hancock Amendment

(From Sen. Jill Carter, R-Joplin)

In Missouri, we have the Hancock Amendment in our Constitution. The Hancock Amendment requires tax increases to be voted on by the people, not just passed by the legislature. 

Several times the gas tax increases were put before Missouri voters and rejected, most recently in 2018. However, in 2021, a coalition of legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, passed a 12.5 cent per gallon gas tax increase down on the people of our state. 

The bill increases our gas tax by 2.5 cents per gallon for five years, eventually increasing the tax by 12.5 cents per gallon. We just finished year two under the gas tax increase, meaning we were paying 5 cents per gallon more because of this law last year. 

This year, we are paying 7.5 cents per gallon extra. The legislature knew this would likely be ruled unconstitutional because of the Hancock Amendment, so a workaround was created to avoid the Missouri Constitution. They decided that they would collect the tax up front, but that if people remembered to collect their receipts and remembered to turn them in, they could get their money back.

Although I was not in the legislature at the time this went through, I vehemently opposed the workaround and the gas tax as a citizen. The gas tax money collected, in large portion, ended up not going to roads and bridges, but to MODOT salary increases. 

At the end of the day in 2021, the then President Pro Tem of the Senate threatened to kill the Second Amendment Preservation Act (SAPA) if they didn't pass his bill to increase the gas tax. All too often, good bills like SAPA are used to leverage the passage of bad bills like the gas tax. This session we worked hard to ensure the bill preventing gender mutilation of kids, the SAFE Act, passed out of the Senate early in session this year, so our kids would not be leveraged like our Second Amendment Rights had been in the past.