Larry Hudkins and other farmers who joined him in opposing a proposed Lancaster County wheel tax aren't celebrating the concept's political demise.
Hudkins, a former county commissioner, helped lead the resistance to a proposal that would have brought together the communities of Hickman and Waverly and the Lancaster County Board to implement a new county fee to help pay for infrastructure improvements.
"This wasn’t anything about a victory at all," Hudkins said. "We don’t have the bridges open; we don’t have the roads done."
And there's still no revenue solution to meet the estimated $15 million annual funding gap to complete road improvements, he said.
Still, Hudkins and other Lancaster County Farm Bureau members saw the wheel tax proposal as an unpalatable solution, one that would hit farmers hardest in already tough economic times.
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Supporters saw the proposal as a solution to the wheel tax inequality between Lincoln and Lancaster County residents, whereby only city dwellers pay a wheel tax for their street repairs and pay property taxes to the county that fund county road improvements.
County and city officials proposed the county wheel tax as a way to improve key corridors leading to and from the county's fastest growing cities and had pitched discounting some rates 50% to acknowledge that some licensed farm vehicles are used infrequently.
They'd hoped this proposal would be different than in 2005, when an effort to enact a wheel tax through a partnership between Lincoln and the county failed to get the County Board votes it needed.
Instead, the latest proposal stalled out without even reaching a vote.Â
The Lancaster County Board can't levy a wheel tax on its own. So, the county sought to form a joint public agency with Hickman and Waverly, drawing on the cities' legal power to institute a wheel tax.Â
Waverly's representatives bowed out first in October, after two city council members there opposed it, said Mayor Mike Werner, who supported the measure and was on a study committee that came up with the idea.
Werner didn't believe it would be worthwhile to move the wheel tax idea forward if he would need to be the tiebreaking vote.
When the spotlight turned to the six-member Hickman City Council, the impact on those outside the city limits was too much for two council members to ignore.
"I wasn't elected to put a wheel tax on the county," Hickman City Council President Phil Goering said last week.
He had an open mind on the idea, and Hickman residents he talked to said it didn't bother them too much.
But Goering, whose parents farmed, couldn't ignore the opposition he heard from farmers who came to a public hearing on the proposed wheel tax in Hickman in September.
Councilman Steven Noren, who's served on Hickman's city council for 14 years, said he also struggled with that notion, along with the idea he'd be voting to tax Hickman residents and then send the money to be spent outside of the city.
"This maybe could hurt us in the long run," Noren said. "I hope it doesn’t.â€
Hickman Mayor Doug Hanson supported the wheel tax as a way to get more money to fund safety improvements along South 68th Street following tragic crashes on the road connecting the city to Lincoln and Norris Public Schools.
Those improvements would also help the corridor prepare for more traffic once the South Beltway is completed, he said.
"This is probably the biggest decision our city council has ever had to make," said Hanson, who served on the council from 1988 through 2014 before he was elected mayor.
He wishes more Hickman residents would have turned out for the meetings on this issue.
Only one person, the lone Hickman resident testifying at a meeting there in September, spoke in support of the wheel tax following testimony from opponent after opponent living outside the community.
As proposed, the wheel tax would have applied to rural Lancaster County residents, residents of unincorporated villages and those in Hickman and Waverly with city council approval.
Incorporated villages, such as Malcolm, Roca, Raymond and Bennet, could have joined if their village boards approved such a move.
Many of the people in Waverly who supported the idea mostly said so privately, Werner said.
"It puts us little cities in a bad spot because you’ve got everybody and his brother coming to these smaller communities telling us not to do this,†Werner said.
Still, the Waverly mayor thought this was the right way to address the problem rather than relying on county commissioners to have to weigh raising property taxes to fund street work every year, he said.
"We’ve ignored this problem for too long and continued to kick the problem down the road," Warner said. "I believe it will catch up with us at some point."
In a recent radio interview, Lancaster County Commissioner Roma Amundson said she was disappointed the proposal had stalled out, and for the time being, a countywide wheel tax concept has been shelved.
The county could potentially partner with the city of Lincoln to try and enact one, but there's been no formal or serious discussions.Â
Farmers, Hudkins said, felt blindsided by the wheel tax proposal and probably only could have stomached the proposal if there was an exemption for farm-plated vehicles.
Instead, they are interested in how a countywide sales tax could address the funding gap or how changes to the gas tax could help, Hudkins said.
Members of the Nebraska Farm Bureau recently adopted a resolution calling on the state to allocate more gas tax dollars for county roads and bridges or increase the rate to reach the same aim, Hudkins said.Â
The funding isn't there to catch up after the county ignored infrastructure maintenance needs for several years, he said, admitting that while he was on the County Board he was guilty of voting to take funding away from road improvements.
He hopes the current commissioners will place a higher priority on roads funding, like they did with this year's budget, spending $3 million more for work on county infrastructure.Â
"We all suffer when we don’t have good roads and bridges," Hudkins said.