It costs Damien Gilliams 40 cents more per gallon to fill up his scooter in Gainesville than when he’s home in Sebastian.
To put it frankly, the UF freshman said he thinks gas prices “suck.”
“They’re really high,” he said as he watched $4.22-per-gallon supreme gasoline flow out into his tank.
In Alachua County, 12 cents is added per gallon to fund road projects, said Mark Sexton, county communications coordinator. And that doesn’t include a 6.8-cent State Comprehensive Enhanced Transportation System Tax that’s the same in every county except Franklin County, which has a 5.8-cent tax.
In Marion County, county taxes are 12 cents, too. In Gilchrist County, the tax is 7 cents. In Levy and Bradford Counties, it’s 6 cents.
David Denslow, UF professor of economics, said he’s heard everything from ideas that gas stations crank up the prices to cheat college students to the notion of fuel monopolies on highways.
But the fact of the matter, he said, is gas prices fluctuate wildly based on the price of oil. Turmoil in oil-rich Middle East countries increases prices, he said, as does China’s growing demand for gas.
Prices are also subject to speculation, the idea of basing today’s prices on tomorrow’s supply.
However, one concrete element within gas bills is government gas taxes.
“Some people have the misconception that when gas taxes shoot up it’s the fault of the county,” Sexton said. “The truth is it would be 12 cents whether gas was 30 cents or $5.”
Federal, state and county taxes add about 50 cents per gallon to your bill, but John Oliver, manager of a Chevron gas station on 53rd Street and 43rd Avenue, said the county typically gets the blame.
“I’ve never heard so much hoo-ha about taxes,” he said. “What do the taxes do? They fix roads.”
Six county road projects that were funded by gas taxes were finished last year, totaling more than $1 million in project costs. Twenty-two other projects have been finished since 2006, and about 15 more are in the works.
The Alachua County Commission added a 5-cent gas tax that went into effect in 2008, which brought in more than $14 million from 2008 to 2010.
Oliver said the new taxes don’t affect his business.
He said he remembers a time when a 1-cent tax would cause a run to the pumps, but those days are long gone.
He said people will pay for the gas, and he thinks they should pay the government their fair share of taxes — at least as long as the government spends the money wisely.
“Now what they spend it on is another story,” he said.
Cadmus McCarty, manager of a Chevron gas station on 34th Street and University Avenue, said his customers will pay despite new gas taxes, but more taxes chip away the respect he has for his county representatives.
“They keep adding more and more taxes, and no one knows where the money’s going that we’re already sending them,” he said. “They just want more and more.”
