State’s modest gas tax hike is only a good first step to modernize our roads and bridges

• Columnist Sid Salter says additional road and bridge funding is long overdue good news.

High on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is a curious edifice, the Old State Capitol (formally, after the 1994 restoration, the Louisiana Museum of Political History) is a Gothic architectural wonder built to resemble a castle.

The interior features a magnificent circular staircase leading to a second-floor gallery of political portraits of the icons of Louisiana state politics, with (of course!) the largest and most ostentatious portrait being Winn Parish’s native son, Huey Pierce Long.

Long’s political animus for Standard Oil and his delight in using his political skill to force the company to pay for things like free school textbooks and charity hospitals was the stuff of legend. Some believed Long to be a socialist, but a more practical definition was that “the Kingfish” was a left-wing populist adept at pitting the have-nots against the haves in politics.

While in Baton Rouge for a conference, it was hard not to think about Huey Long and the truths and fictions of Louisiana politics. That was particularly true in comparing Mississippi’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure to those in Louisiana.

On July 1 in Mississippi, new laws went on the books, cutting the sales tax on groceries and raising the state tax on gasoline. The higher gas tax, to be phased in over three years, will raise the gas tax to 27 cents per gallon.

In 1932, Mississippi Gov. Mike Conner proposed the nation’s first sales tax at three cents on the dollar. The Legislature gave him a two-cent tax that has since grown to a 7% sales tax.

The 2025 Mississippi tax compromise bill offers a 2% reduction in the state’s sales tax on groceries. All sales taxes are regressive — penalizing the poor more than the wealthy — but after more than a quarter-century of political infighting, the proposed compromise offers some tangible relief.

After the inflation endured on groceries during the Biden Administration and that generated by rising tariffs in the Trump Administration, any relief on grocery bills will be welcomed by Mississippi shoppers.

Another intriguing facet of the tax compromise is an increase in the state’s gasoline tax. The tax compromise calls for adding a total of nine cents per gallon (CPG) to the state’s gas tax over the next three years. The only state with lower gas taxes than Mississippi is Alaska.

Mississippi’s prior 18.4 cents per gallon state gas tax (CPG) is a flat tax. When we paid $3.965 a gallon for gas in 2008, the tax was 18.4 CPG. When we pay $2.42 per gallon at the pump this week, the state tax is still 18.4 CPG.

The only way the state takes in more revenue from gas taxes is for the volume of gas consumed to increase, and automobiles are now manufactured to require less fuel consumption than a decade ago.  The state fuel tax rates haven’t increased since 1987, the last time the state was particularly serious about improving our highway system.

The federal fuel tax is also 18.4 cents per gallon and hasn’t changed since 1993. Neither the federal nor state fuel taxes have kept pace with inflation. Indexed for inflation, both federal and state fuel tax rates are insufficient to adequately build and maintain those infrastructures, but this increase will be a dramatic improvement.

Highway construction costs on average run between $2 million to $3 million a mile in rural areas and up to $15 million a mile in urban areas, according to a 2025 analysis of industry data.

Even with the higher state gas taxes, revenue from the state lottery and existing revenue sources, Mississippi has a long way to go in rebuilding the state’s road and bridge infrastructure.

But for all the problems in getting the 2025 session to the finish line with policy progress, the fact that 30 years of advocacy for additional road and bridge funding was heard and acted upon by the Mississippi Legislature is long overdue good news.

Would that the late Transportation Commissioner Dick Hall lived to see the gas tax hike enacted. Some 15 years ago, Hall called out lawmakers over the issue: “When I tell them there’s over 1,000 deficient bridges in this state that need to be seriously repaired or replaced at a cost of some $2.5 billion, and it’s almost 5,000 main miles of highway that need serious repair and reconstruction, costing a billion dollars, do they think that we are lying? How can you possibly pretend that nothing needs to be done?”