Centre County’s vehicle registration fee will remain for another five years
The fee for local use will remain in place for another five years after the Centre County Commissioners voted 2-1 on Tuesday to continue the program.
The fee for local use is the $5 vehicle registration fee that the commissioners enacted in 2017 through the ACT 89 transportation bill. In 2021, Centre County received roughly $600,000 in fee for local use revenue.
Commissioners Michael Pipe and Mark Higgins voted to adopt a resolution to extend ordinance 2 of 2017 (the implementation of a fee for local use) for another five years to collect an annual county fee of $5 for each non-exempt vehicle registered to an address located in Centre County. Commissioner Steve Dershem voted against it, stating he “appreciated the value” of the program, but couldn’t support it.
“We don’t own any roads. And that’s been my ... my angst about this,” he said.
“....To me, particularly with trailers, as I said before, it’s just onerous. And ... certainly I will grant that every dollar has been spent on this program. It’s just not one that I can yet support, but I appreciate its value.”
Higgins spoke of the importance of the fee and how it has impacted Centre County since it was first put into place. As an example, he said if a municipality has a $1 million bridge repair, the state doesn’t just give the municipality the money.
“If you want any money from the state, you have to come up with some percentage of that yourself whether it’s a quarter of the money, or half the money, or 20% of the money. The state doesn’t just give you the cash,” Higgins said. The money collected from the $5 fee can be used as leverage.
Local townships and boroughs already have to come up with up to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to try to maintain what they have, Higgins said during a recent commissioners meeting. With the liquid fuels program, the county received up to $2 million in requests last year but only had $160,000 from the state to assist them.
Pipe said the county will continue to see municipalities with projects getting funded with the fee for local use funds and the need is still there.
“I think the impact has been positive over the last five years with this,” Pipe said. “I think enough evidence has come in that it’s still needed. And again, if we don’t fix it now we’re going to fix it later at a higher price.”
The commissioners have allocated funds from the fee to over a dozen projects over the years, Pipe said, and in the same 2-1 vote they approved six projects to receive some fee for local use funding in June.
Projects include:
This story was originally published February 8, 2022 at 3:33 PM.
