As a member of the state Assembly in the 1990s, Scott Walker stared down Gov. Tommy Thompson on a plan to raise gas taxes for transportation projects. Nearly 20 years later, Gov. Scott Walker’s administration has a proposal to raise gas taxes for transportation projects. Credit: Journal Sentinel files

As a backbench legislator in the 1990s, Scott Walker joined a successful revolt to block the Republican leadership from boosting the gas tax to pay for highway projects.

Walker was proud of his role in the seven-month-long fight to hold the line on transportation spending.

"This proposal gets the job done without soaking Wisconsin's overburdened taxpayers," Walker, then a Republican representative, said after he and eight other GOP hard-liners won a fight with party leaders.

Now the roles have reversed.

Soon to start his second term as governor, Walker may be on the verge of committing the ultimate political flip-flop.

His administration has put on the table a plan to increase how much Wisconsin motorists pay at the pump to finance road repairs — just the sort of plan that he opposed as a member of the Assembly.

Mike McCabe, head of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and a frequent Walker critic, said it's not just the governor's position that has changed. Since 2008, the Republican governor has received $893,000 from hundreds of highway construction officials and execs, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis of McCabe's database.

"There was a time when Walker got virtually nothing from the road builders — road builders were not significant contributors at all," McCabe said.

"That changed once he became governor. He began to get major road-building support," McCabe said. "That has changed the calculus."

Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb — a Walker appointee and cabinet member — is pushing a plan to increase his budget by $750 million in new taxes and fees over two years to pay for a variety of road-building projects.

Gottlieb is recommending that the state adjust the way the gas tax is calculated, a move that would boost the tax by about 5 cents a gallon.

Walker has refused in recent days to rule out anything in the department's budget, including a gas tax increase.

"In terms of budgets, I'm not making any absolutes on anything right now," Walker said. "It doesn't mean that I'm ultimately going to support (the gas tax). The bottom line is, these are just recommendations from agencies.... There will be significant changes between now and the time we introduce the budget."

He was not always so open to the idea of raising the gas tax.

This summer, Walker was critical of using this funding mechanism.

"I don't think the gas tax is a good long-term solution for transportation because the gas tax at both the state and local level continues to go down by virtue of gallons of gas purchased," Walker said in July during a Milwaukee event. "There's got to be some alternative."

The governor also made it very clear that he recalls that he helped make a name for himself by joining the gas tax revolt. When a reporter brought up the subject but gave the wrong year for it, Walker jumped in to clarify: "It was '95."

That's exactly right.

In March 1995, then-Gov. Tommy Thompson proposed boosting the oil franchise fee to pay for an additional $270 million in road construction projects. The fee would have been an indirect way to raise the gas tax by more than 5 cents per gallon.

Ten relatively new Republican lawmakers, all of whom had run on no-tax pledges, balked at the plan. Among those joining Walker were Glenn Grothman, now a U.S. congressman-elect; Frank Lasee, now a state senator; and Mary Lazich, who was recently voted by her colleagues to be president of the state Senate.

The next seven months saw Assembly leaders offer up a series of direct and indirect gas tax proposals, and Thompson called in each of the 10 lawmakers to try to win them over.

Neither tactic worked.

"It's always a little intimidating to be in the governor's office, but I'm walking and talking — still have my knees," Lazich said after meeting with Thompson in July 1995.

'A defining moment'

In the end, Republican Assembly leaders and Thompson were able to peel off only one of the 10 rebels, and the gas tax proposal went down to defeat.

"It became sort of a defining moment for our caucus," said Scott Jensen, who was the Republican Assembly majority leader at the time.

He said in an interview last week that GOP representatives — who had gained control of the Assembly for the first time in 24 years — realized that "this place only works if we're all together." He added, "I don't think I ever lost again."

Jensen told GQ earlier this year that the issue was also a defining moment for Walker, who was in his second term as a Wauwatosa rep.

"I think there were two things at play," Jensen said. "First, Scott was sincerely of the view that he didn't come here to raise taxes. I think he also knew it was a chance to elevate his profile in the Milwaukee talk-radio profile. And he very quickly became a hero in the talk-radio crowd for holding the line on taxes."

McCabe, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign boss, said Walker was not under any real pressure from the road builders when he served in the state Assembly.

From 1993 to 2001, he received a total of $2,550 from road-building interests. He cashed another $2,050 during his aborted gubernatorial campaign in 2005.

Road-builder cash rolls in

But that all changed three years later when Walker emerged as the front-runner to win the Republican nomination for governor.

Since then, 779 officials and execs from numerous road-building firms have given a total of $893,005 to Walker's campaign fund, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign records.

More than half of that came during Walker's 2012 recall race, when he collected $476,890 from road builders.

On top of all of that, the Wisconsin Transportation Builders Association gave $25,000 to the Republican Governors Association — which has actively backed Walker — in March 2010. McCabe noted that the donation came a few weeks after Walker spoke at the road builder lobby's annual meeting in Florida.

That edges the total take to nearly $1 million for Walker.

"It will be very difficult for him to stand up to the road builders," McCabe said. "The road builders have become a major supporter of the governor, and they'll look to call in that chip."

The only question now is: Will the Republican backbenchers in the state Assembly go along?

Kevin Crowe of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

Contact Daniel Bice at (414) 224-2135 or dbice@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanielBice or on Facebook at fb.me/daniel.bice.