By Steve Haner,

Virginia’s gasoline taxes rise again on July 1, a continuing legacy of former Governor Ralph Northam’s most taxing term.  He signed the 2020 bill calling for annual gas tax adjustments for inflation, so the combined taxes will rise from 41.6 cents per gallon to 42.4 cents per gallon.  It was a bipartisan bill, to be fair.

The brilliant deception tactic instituted with that 2020 legislation also continues to hold.  The tax is broken into pieces, with a retail portion, a wholesale portion, and a small addition to cover an environmental fund for underground storage tanks. 

The retail tax is currently 31.7 cents per gallon, and that is the number Republican activists used with when they proposed a gas tax holiday earlier this year.  They completely forgot about the wholesale portion, another 9.3 cents per gallon reported by the Division of Motor Vehicles on an entirely different webpage. 

The incorrect 31.7 cents per gallon amount popped up again in a guest column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch this week, also promoting a short (and basically symbolic) suspension.  And then I saw it again today in a post online listing all the states that are raising that tax on July 1.  The wholesale tax gets ignored almost every time, even though it adds about dime a gallon and moves Virginia much higher in the tax rankings.

To review, on July 1 the retail tax will become 32.6 cents per gallon, the wholesale tax 9.6 cents per gallon, and the tank fee tax only 2 tenths of a cent (a decrease that softens the blow of those increases.)  The combined total, Virginia, will be 42.4 cents per gallon (43.5 cents for diesel).  The fees collected on electric and hybrid vehicles also tick up due to inflation.