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Eye On Boise

Allred - with pickup truck - touts ‘fair share’ fees for heavy trucks vs. cars, pickups

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keith Allred with his pickup truck, discussing car and truck registration fees (Betsy Russell)
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keith Allred with his pickup truck, discussing car and truck registration fees (Betsy Russell)

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keith Allred stood by his pickup truck - a Ford F-250 "SuperDuty" 4x4 - today to make a case that he's the "fiscal conservative" in the race because, through his work at the nonpartisan citizen group The Common Interest, he helped defeat Gov. Butch Otter's 2009 proposal to raise gas taxes and more than double car and pickup truck registration fees, and identified a $10 million error in one of Otter's transportation funding bills that year. "I was doing it working for free for a citizens organization," he said. Allred said heavy trucks should pay more, not cars and pickups, to reflect "their fair share of the wear and tear on the roads." He noted that Otter's transportation task force now is working on a new cost-allocation study to determine that fair share, after the governor's initial proposal failed in the 2009 Legislature.

Allred, who held his press conference across from the state Capitol despite occasional light rain, said he wanted to use his truck as a prop, given the topic. Asked by a reporter, he also affirmed that the truck in question was his. "It's hard to haul horses without a truck," he said.



Betsy Z. Russell
Betsy Z. Russell joined The Spokesman-Review in 1991. She currently is a reporter in the Boise Bureau covering Idaho state government and politics, and other news from Idaho's state capital.

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