Find better transit fee

A different kind of public transit service is approaching with Tri-Rail's double-tracking and every-20-minute trains. It will require a new way of financing the South Florida Regional Transit Authority, which operates transit in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. State legislators can decide how to raise up to $45 million for expanded train and bus service, or continue to leave perhaps eight times as much mass-transit money in Washington for lack of a dedicated matching source.

The plan in Tallahassee -- House Bill 1409 -- to collect $100 each time a newly purchased vehicle is registered in the three counties is far from perfect. It's unfair to someone who buys an older car for a few hundred dollars. It also shows how self-defeating is the anti-tax obsession in the Legislature, which in 2003 prohibited the counties from assessing a $2 annual license tag fee. That would have provided the predictable and reliable revenue source required to be leveraged into millions in federal money.

As Washington was designating the 5.2 million-person region the nation's sixth-largest, legislators were saddling the area with the "compromise" that forced each of the counties to take gas-tax money committed to local transportation projects to finance $2.67 million a year for the authority's capital projects, plus $1.57 million each in operating costs. That's particularly galling because the three counties are net donors of gas-tax money.

Taking a hint, transit supporters abandoned a proposed $5 tag fee that would have brought in about $20 million a year. Other regions, such as Orlando and Tampa, also see the registration fee as more viable. Even if more road-building was the answer to the looming gridlock, Miami-Dade and Broward are built out. The $350 million in projects planned in Palm Beach County alone, including Okeechobee Boulevard and Glades Road rapid bus transit, and Tri-Rail's extension to Jupiter and to Mecca Farms if Scripps goes there, justify competing with New York and Los Angeles.

While the $100 fee that the House Transportation Committee approved last week and which goes to another committee today will not hit every car owner every year, the House and Senate still should eliminate blatant inequities. But South Florida needs regional road relief, not more ideology.