Bill seeks tribes’ gas money

BOISE – A group of top GOP lawmakers is again going after Idaho Indian tribal money, seeking to seize about $3 million in annual gas tax revenues that courts earlier ruled belong to the tribes.

“We’re losing $3 million a year of transportation money,” said House Transportation Committee Chairwoman JoAn Wood, R-Rigby. “You know who put the tax on gas – the state did, to get the money to take care of the highways. Everybody should pay.”

Idaho collected $217 million in gas tax in 2005, according to the state Tax Commission.

Chief Allan, Coeur d’Alene tribal chairman, has been in the Statehouse all week lobbying against the bill.

“Last week it was gambling, this week it is fuel tax,” he said. “It really makes us have concerns. … These kinds of issues and attacks come at us all the time. We’re getting tired of them.”

A House committee on Feb. 16 rejected a bill from members of the House Republican leadership that would have launched a state-financed constitutional challenge of the successful voter initiative that legalized limited gambling at Indian reservation casinos.

Allan said if the state continues such approaches to dealing with the tribes, the Coeur d’Alenes may consider walking away from the Coeur d’Alene Basin cleanup, in which they play a key role.

“We’re talking millions at the Superfund site,” he said. “They need to realize what they’re doing.”

That’s troubling, said Rep. George Sayler, D-Coeur d’Alene. “If they’re threatening to walk away from the basin commission, that’s pretty serious,” he said.

The Coeur d’Alenes stand to lose about $500,000 a year in gas taxes, but the impact on other tribes may be much greater. The Shoshone-Bannock tribes in southeastern Idaho operate a busy truck stop/gas station on the freeway.

At one time, at least some of Idaho’s tribes paid the gas tax to the state for their reservation gas sales to nontribal members, but then the state Tax Commission tried to go after them for tax money on sales to their own members as well. The case went to court, and the state lost, with the Idaho Supreme Court ruling that the state can’t constitutionally tax tribal gas sales on the reservation, regardless of whether the customers are tribal members. An appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals also went against the state.

Now, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Kansas case has raised hopes for some that Idaho’s laws can be rejiggered to make a state gas tax on tribal sales constitutional.

That’s what HB 661 attempts to do.

“I think it’s the intent of the bill to just take money away from the tribes,” said Bill Roden, lobbyist for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe. “It’s wrong.”

The Idaho Indian Affairs Council, which includes state lawmakers and tribal leaders, voted last week to oppose HB 661 in favor of a yearlong moratorium in which tribes and the state would negotiate about fair distribution of gas taxes.

Rep. Joe Cannon, R-Blackfoot, who had been a sponsor of the bill, then went to Wood and told her he’d like to hold the bill in favor of the moratorium. She refused and scheduled a hearing on it for today.

“He didn’t consult any of us when he made that kind of an offer (to the tribe),” Wood said. She is a co-sponsor of the bill, along with House Majority Leader Lawerence Denney, R-Midvale; Senate Transportation Chairman Skip Brandt, R-Kooskia; Senate President Pro-Tem Robert Geddes; and Sen. Hal Bunderson, R-Meridian.

Cannon said he pulled his name off the bill. “Better to negotiate than litigate, that’s my position,” he said.

Cannon said his original concern was that the Shoshone-Bannocks, unlike northern tribes, charged a lower tribal gas tax than the state, resulting in a lower pump price that area non-Indian retailers contended put them at a disadvantage. Cannon said the tribe agreed to charge the same tax and eliminate the disparity during the year of negotiations.

Sen. Mike Jorgenson, R-Hayden Lake, chairman of the Indian Affairs Council, said he’ll testify against the bill at the hearing today and call instead for the House Transportation Committee to follow the council’s recommendation for a year of negotiations.

“These people are providing a lot of employment, a lot of benefits, a lot of new economy,” Jorgenson said. The bill, he said, is “just not the spirit of collaboration, cooperation, communication. … It’s frankly an embarrassment.”

Allan said the Coeur d’Alenes spend the $500,000 they raise in reservation gas taxes for lake cleanup and transportation needs on the reservation. “If they take that away, I hope they have a way to pay for that,” he said.