BREMERTON — For the past seven years, rising ticket prices have contributed mightily to keeping Washington State Ferries afloat.

Finally, the state is investigating whether there’s a better way. The process will take another year, but the conclusion might ease the burden on customers.

The nation’s largest ferry system was flying high until November 1999, when voters killed the hated Motor Vehicle Excise Tax. They detested paying hundreds of dollars each year for car tabs, and they overwhelmingly passed Tim Eyman’s Initiative 695. I-695 was ruled unconstitutional, but lawmakers axed the license tax anyway.

Ferry officials had warned of the repercussions — that losing the car-tab tax would cost it $52 million in operating revenues. But the tax cut was too tempting, and many believed the ferry system was bluffing. It wasn’t.

State officials immediately cut ferry service by $22 million and pilfered $30 million from reserves just to make it through the year. Lawmakers never found a permanent replacement for the car-tab revenues. They have raised fares, shuffled money from highway projects, reduced service and cut costs just to get by.

“We cobbled together all those things from one year to the next to the next to the next,” said ferry system director Mike Anderson, who has announced he’ll retire this month. “People have realized it’s time to look at this from a long-term, sustainable perspective rather than year to year.”

That’s the bottom line for the ongoing, state-mandated Ferry Financing Study II. Community leaders are getting in on the act with a Puget Sound Leadership Ferry Summit today in Bremerton.

Since 2000, ticket prices have shot up 80 percent. Nearly three million fewer people rode the boats in 2006 than in 1999. The steeper prices more than offset the lost customers, however, resulting in a 54 percent revenue gain.

Fares, which paid for 59 percent of operations in 1999, peaked at covering 79 percent of operations costs in 2004 before rising fuel prices dragged them back to 74 percent. The percentage was supposed to keep growing, to 100 percent by 2022 and 109 percent by 2030.

The ferry finance study will examine virtually every aspect of the ferry system.

Washington State Ferries and the Department of Transporation will conduct a ridership forecast, study operational strategies and pricing strategies, and develop vehicle level-of-service and terminal design standards.

The goal is to finish all the work and use the results to revise the ferry system’s long-range plan and write a draft 16-year capital budget for the Legislature to act on in early 2009. Until then, there won’t be any fare increases or terminal work.