Gov. Jerry Brown of California in Los Angeles before signing a bill hiking California's minimum wage to $15 by 2023. Thomson Reuters California lawmakers on Thursday approved legislation to increase gasoline taxes and other transportation-related fees for the first time in decades, to fund an ambitious $52 billion plan to repair the state's sagging infrastructure.

The legislation heads to the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat who urged its support after the Democratic-led state legislature passed it Thursday with a 27-11 vote in the Senate and then a 54-26 vote hours later in the Assembly.

"The Democratic Party is the party of doing things, and tonight we did something to fix the roads in California," Brown said during a news conference after the vote. "We got to fix them. It takes real money."

The measure will increase the excise tax on gasoline by $0.12 a gallon from the current $0.28 and on diesel fuel by $0.20 cents a gallon, among other fees, over 10 years. The money will be used for repairs to roads and bridges as well as for anticongestion projects.

Owners of electric vehicles, who do not use gasoline and would not pay the gas tax, would have to pay a $100 fee to help repair roads. The fees and taxes should raise about $5.2 billion a year.

Motorists in California will see costs increase by about $10 a month on average, according to Democrats, the Sacramento Bee newspaper reported.

Republicans condemned the plan, saying the state's transportation taxes and fees were already among the highest in the country.

"Democrats want us to pick up the tab for their decades of neglect," state party chairman Jim Brulte said in a statement. "The liberal Democrat elites are out of touch, and Californians should not be used as a piggy bank for the majority party's failures."

Streets and highway overpasses in San Diego in 2016. Reuters/Mike Blake

California's transportation systems have gone unrepaired and unexpanded for decades, as budget constraints and politics have stymied plans by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Brown, a fiscal moderate credited with bringing the state back from a $27 billion budget gap, has refused to sign on to plans that involve borrowing money, and Republicans and some moderate Democrats have resisted raising gasoline taxes.

But the same Democratic wave that led California to go two-for-one in favor of the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in November gave the party a two-thirds majority in both houses of the legislature, enough to pass new taxes without Republican support.

The deal won support of construction companies and labor unions, and Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday put up a unified front on what had been the divisive issue of raising taxes.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee, editing by Larry King)