Welch: The gas taxes nobody voted for
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, July 8, 2026
On July 1, the price at every gas pump in Snohomish County ticked up by a fraction of a cent, and not one member of the Legislature had to put a name on it. That was the whole point.
Washington’s state gas tax rose about 2 percent that morning, climbing to 56.5 cents a gallon. Small money this year. A rounding error on a fill-up. What matters is not the number. It is how the number got there.
It got there on autopilot. Last year the Legislature passed House Bill 2711, and the governor signed it. The law indexes the state gas tax to rise automatically every July 1, roughly 2 percent a year, from now on. No vote. No debate. No public hearing. No roll call. As the Washington Policy Center’s Charles Prestrud wrote when the first increase hit, the act “removes the requirements for debate, public input or discussion, or legislative action before subsequent increases.” The tax now raises itself.
Here is the part that should really get your attention. The 2 percent escalator is the smaller of two automatic gas taxes you are already paying. The bigger one does not even call itself a tax.
It is the Climate Commitment Act. Passed in 2021, it set up what the state calls cap and invest. Fuel suppliers have to buy carbon allowances to cover the emissions from the gas they sell, and they buy those allowances at auctions the Department of Ecology runs every quarter. The most recent were held on March 11 and June 10 this year, with the next round due this fall. Whatever the suppliers pay, they pass down to you at the pump. The Western States Petroleum Association and the Washington Policy Center estimate the program now adds roughly 40 cents to a gallon of gas and about 50 cents to diesel. Ecology disputes those figures, so weigh them as a contested estimate, but nobody claims the cost is zero.
Notice what is missing from that process. A vote. The pump price of the Climate Commitment Act is set at auction, by the market, four times a year. No legislator ever stands up and votes for this year’s number, because there is no number to vote on until the bidding closes. Lawmakers cast one vote, in 2021, to build the machine. The machine has been raising the cost of your commute on its own ever since.
The program is also engineered to climb. The auction has a price floor that rises automatically every year, about 5 percent plus inflation, sitting at $27.92 per allowance in 2026 according to Ecology and the International Carbon Action Partnership. That is the floor, the least it can cost. At the same time, the state shrinks the supply of allowances each year to hit its emissions targets, down about 7 percent to 49 million metric tons in 2026, and tighter every year after. A rising floor under a shrinking supply is a price built to go up. By design.
There is a familiar pattern here. For two decades, Congress has handed its hardest calls to presidents and judges, so no member ever has to cast a tough vote. Olympia has learned the same trick, closer to home. A gas tax increase is a hard vote. Drivers feel it, and they remember it in November. So, the Legislature found two ways to keep the money flowing without anyone standing up to defend the increases. One indexes the tax to a formula. The other buries the tax inside a carbon market and lets an auction do the raising. Build the escalator once, then let it run.
Here is why that should bother you, even if you think the state needs the money. A tax vote is the one moment when the people who spend your money have to face you. They have to say, in public and on the record, I am raising this, and here is why. That record is the accountability. Take away the vote, and you take away the accountability with it. The money still leaves your wallet. The people responsible just get to stay anonymous.
There is a budgeting cost too. An automatic increase, Prestrud notes, “reduces pressure on the legislature to set priorities within a limited budget.” When revenue climbs on its own, nobody has to choose between fixing the I-5 corridor and funding some lower priority down the list. The escalator papers over the choice. That is no small thing in a state that already pays among the highest gas prices in the country, stacking the 56.5 cent state tax, the 18.4 cent federal tax, and the Climate Commitment Act on top of one another before you have driven a mile.
Now bring it home. This region pays at both ends. Every commuter grinding up I-5 or across on Highway 2 pays it at the pump. And the crossing that ties Snohomish County to Island County, the Mukilteo to Clinton ferry, runs on diesel. That route carried 2.1 million vehicles last year, more than any other in the system, according to Washington State Ferries, and the fleet as a whole burns close to 19 million gallons of fuel a year. When fuel costs climb, the pressure lands on ferry budgets and eventually on fares and sailing schedules. Here the two autopilots split. The gas tax escalator does not actually ride on that ferry diesel, because the state’s per gallon fuel tax is a highway tax and the fuel a boat burns is not charged at the pump the way the diesel in a truck is. The Climate Commitment Act is the opposite. Its maritime exemption only covers marine fuel burned outside Washington, and every Mukilteo to Clinton run burns its fuel inside state waters, so Washington State Ferries pays the same carbon cost you do, on close to 19 million gallons a year. None of that carbon cost comes back to run the boats. The Climate Commitment Act money that returns to the ferry system, about 599 million dollars so far, is walled off for building hybrid electric vessels and charging terminals, not for the fuel bill and not for your fare. The ferry pays the climate cost now and waits years for the boats that are supposed to end it. Whidbey does not get to opt out of the water between it and the mainland.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether Washington’s roads need more money or whether the state should price carbon. I am open to both arguments. The maintenance backlog is real, Cascade bridges do not fix themselves, and climate is a serious question. But those are arguments to have out loud, in a hearing room, with a vote at the end that somebody has to own. They are not arguments to settle once and then wire shut so they never have to be had again. To be fair, the carbon price can move down as well as up. It dipped when a repeal initiative was on the 2024 ballot. But a rising floor and a shrinking cap tilt it upward over any stretch of years, which is the honest way to read it.
A tax you can trace to a name on a roll call is a tax you can fight. You can testify against it. You can vote the sponsor out. A tax that raises itself every summer, and a carbon cost that raises itself every quarter, while the Legislature looks the other way, are taxes built to be unprotestable. That is the real cost of putting your gas taxes on autopilot, and it runs a lot deeper than a penny a gallon.
Todd Welch is a Herald columnist covering local and state issues.
