Electric vehicle owners hoping to make the planet greener almost had to cough up their own wad of green to pay for it.
A bill that would’ve added a $200 annual license tax to register electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles died before the end of Florida’s annual legislative session, never getting a hearing from the Senate’s Appropriations Committee. The Transportation Committee in December had unanimously approved Senate Bill 28, which Sen. Ed Hooper, R-Palm Harbor, filed in September.
Hooper’s goal was for the funding to begin making up for gas taxes lost because of electric vehicles (EVs). The Florida Department of Transportation’s EV Infrastructure Master Plan from July 2021 states that negative impacts to Florida’s motor fuel-based revenue could range from 5.6% all the way up to 20% in 2040, depending on EV sales growth rates.
According to the Department of Energy, Florida had almost 168,000 EV registrations across the state at the end of 2022, second only to California.
During December’s Senate Committee on Transportation meeting, Hooper said “This is about fairness to everyone who uses our roadway system. Our roads are in good shape, and we want to keep it that way.”
Sen. Tracie Davis, D-Jacksonville, asked Hooper why $200 was a fair assessment. He explained that more than 30 states now have electric vehicle registration fees. Several of them have what he called a sliding scale, “That goes from not very much to over $1,000.”
Hooper referenced Ohio, Arkansas, Alabama, West Virginia and Texas as other states that have $200 in additional fees for EVs, while states like Tennessee, Georgia and Indiana have even higher numbers. “We’re not the lone ranger,” he told senators.
The number was based on a chart from the Electric Drive Transportation Association comparing each state’s miles driven with the associated taxes. For every 10,000 miles driven, the data showed, a Floridian would pay $190.17 in gas tax.
Over 60% of the funds made off these additional fees would funnel into the State Transportation Trust Fund, which is what maintains the state’s highways. The remaining 36% would be given to the county where that vehicle is registered.
“To remain silent on this issue for very long is eventually going to put the state in a crisis where we can’t have adequate transportation capacity,” Hooper said to the committee.
Other speakers who appeared before the committee disagreed about the amount’s fairness, such as Leighanne Boone, who represented the non-profit Rethink Energy Action Fund. She told the committee the bill “needlessly does take money out of hardworking Floridians’ pockets.”
The populace she’s referencing includes Jay Summet, the vice president of the Central Florida chapter of the Electric Vehicle Association, who promotes the adoption of EVs through public education and volunteer outreach in the Orlando area. With almost 650 members, the chapter’s Facebook group gives a space for both current and potential EV owners to discuss issues around electric vehicles in the region – issues like SB 28.
Summet called the license fee’s amount reasonable. “EV drivers already save a large amount of money on fuel costs because they never buy gas, and the cost of electricity needed per mile is so much cheaper than the equivalent cost in gasoline,” Summet said. He cited the Department of Energy’s statistic from 2019, in which the average amount of gasoline tax paid by a Florida driver was $271 per year.
“I would not like having to pay them [additional license taxes] all at once when I renewed my registration, instead of spread out across the year and incorporated into the cost of gas, but I've saved so much money not buying gas that I could afford them,” he said.
Moving forward after this bill’s demise, Summet suggested other routes the legislature could take. All vehicles could be charged a yearly road tax or per-mile road tax, he said, basing it on vehicle weight or number of axles. This could cause the gasoline tax to be dropped entirely, be redirected to build infrastructure (such as EV chargers) or used to find other ways to reduce the country’s dependence on carbon emissions and foreign oil.
Bennett Elder, a 40-year-old member of the Electric Vehicle Association in Jacksonville, wasn’t aware of the bill over its short life span in the Florida Senate. However, he agrees with other members of the association’s Facebook group who don’t want to be taxed twice for electricity or support a bill that could deter drivers from switching to EVs.
“It's a continuation of the protection of the status quo because letting the world change for the better doesn't get people reelected,” Elder said. “Never mind all the health benefits and economic benefits of switching our transportation to run off of the free, zero maintenance fusion reactor right there in the sky.”
Other chapters of the EVA were also reacting to SB 28. Joshua Pritt, a 43-year-old software engineer in Melbourne, is a member of the Space Coast’s chapter and has been driving electric for over a decade.
“A flat fee is wholly and measurably unfair,” Pritt said, calling it “an extra, unplanned expense to account for in the family budget.” He also thinks basing a fee off weight or previous miles driven would be the way to go in the future.
“Fewer people would be able to afford such a large fee on top of this,” he said, referencing how EVs are more expensive at the outset, though the growing market for used EVs is helping to lower costs.
According to Florida Power and Light, one of every four vehicles sold in the United States will be battery powered by 2030, causing the number of EVs in Florida alone to double.