Committee reviews mileage-based user fee plan to charge electric vehicles for road use

Patrick Murphy, state policy director at the Vermont Agency of Transportation, told the House Transportation Committee on Feb. 18 that the agency is advancing a mileage-based user fee to recover transportation revenue from electric vehicles and to address long-term declines in gas-tax receipts.

Murphy said Vermont now has about 18,000 electric vehicles in the state, “of which nearly 11,000 are fully electric,” and that recent new-vehicle sales of electrified vehicles were about 12% for the full year, rising to roughly 13.6% in the third quarter. He said the state has used modeling tied to the Climate Action Plan to estimate how vehicle adoption affects future revenues and noted the committee’s statutory direction to study options.

The agency’s preferred approach would rely on odometer readings already captured during Vermont’s annual vehicle safety inspection. Murphy said the inspection program now validates those odometer entries with a photo capture; the plan calls for linking that data to the state’s vehicle-registration system (MyDMV) so fees can be applied at registration or renewal. “It attempts to try and account…