Some Texas gasoline tax money is making its way to Washington D.C. never to return, a situation federal lawmakers say is shortchanging the Lone Star State by nearly $1 billion a year.

In a March 26 letter, Texas’ entire D.C. delegation — two senators and 36 representatives — urged their House and Senate colleagues that oversee transportation funding to fix the formula that doles out the Highway Trust Fund.

Because of decade-old rules for how money flows from the gas pump to Washington and back, Texas drivers are the only motorists in the nation that pay more in fuel taxes than they receive in highway spending.

“Texas only receives 95 cents back for every dollar it sent to Washington in federal fuel taxes,” lawmakers wrote in the letter, spearheaded by Dallas area Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson.

That nickel adds up. If Texas received the amount it contributes relative to the total take, officials said, the state’s share from the highway fund would jump from $3.79 billion to more than $4.73 billion annually. Right now, Texas contributes $220 million more than it receives, and gets none of the money lawmakers add to shore up the highway fund.

“Coming up $940 million short in business would be a problem, so it’s certainly a problem that Texas is coming up that short,” said Rep. Randy Weber, a Friendswood Republican who represents a wide swath of Texas’ northeast Gulf Coast. “Our highways and roadways see heavy traffic, which results in wear and tear. Our ask is simple: that Texas be allocated appropriate funding given the amount we contribute.”

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The total yearly budget for the Texas Department of Transportation is about $13 billion.

“We feel it is a fairness issue,” said Marc Williams, deputy executive director of TxDOT.

The fund collects most of the money from the federal gas tax and then remits it to the states based on a funding formula that has not changed since 2009.

“Each state’s share of the total program is stuck in 2009,” said Jeff Davis, senior fellow with the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington D.C.-based non-partisan policy group.

Therein lies the problem, Texas officials said. The spending plan uses Texas’ 2000 population of 20 million to set part of the formula, along with many other criteria such as miles of federal highways and daily driving in the state. Texas now has about 29 million residents, and represents a larger share of the nation’s population. The state also added 1,463 lane miles of major interstates from 2009 to 2017, a 6.5 percent increase, many of those lanes choked with congestion.

In their letter, members of the Texas delegation noted the state contributed 11.17 percent of the nation’s gas tax revenues in fiscal 2018, but received 8.95 percent of the trust fund’s distribution. The longer Texas’ elected officials let it go, the worse it will get, Williams said. Each time costs and congestion rise and the state’s share of the money stays the same, it leads to a few less miles of repaved roads.

“If it continues to perpetuate itself into the future,” Williams said of the current funding plan, “we are going to be farther and farther away.”

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Problems with the trust fund, however, are bigger than Texas. For more than 20 years, transportation experts have warned that the trust fund’s ability to fund highway projects is dwindling. Cars are more fuel efficient, and the 18.5 cent tax on each gallon of gas does not fluctuate with the price. As cars and trucks travel farther on that gallon of gas, rising costs has meant that money bought less road work in the 26 years since the last national fuel tax increase.

Following record high gasoline prices and an economic downturn, Congress in 2009 started using general fund money to shore up the trust fund.

Prior to that, more than a dozen states were so-called “donors” to the trust fund, paying in more than they received, and had been for decades, Davis said. The trust fund was intended to equalize highway spending to build the national freeway system — knowing that places such as Texas collected much more in fuel taxes but that states such as Montana still needed investment in interstates.

“You have got to be able to get it from east to west,” Davis said of redistributing money among the states.

In the years that followed, he said about 14 states — mostly in the Sun Belt — collected more than they received. Texas is just the last one standing, since the general fund money is filling the gap for others.

The state is guaranteed 95 percent of its gas tax revenues, per the 2009 process.

“No one back then thought a state would ever trigger that,” Davis said.

With current collections and funding levels, for Texas to recoup its full amount, other states would receive less funding. The more likely outcome is a rethinking of how the trust fund is distributed, as part of a broader discussion of how the federal government doles out its road money, Davis said.

“Once we started putting general fund money into the fund, people stopped paying attention to the donor/donnee debate,” he said.

dug.begley@chron.com

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