Due to the elimination of the Interior Compensation Fund to the provinces, localities in Comahue will begin applying a road tax on gasoline priceswhich will mean an increase of 4.5% in the value of fuel.
In this way, a liter of super gasoline would go from $572 to $592 and the charge on each tank would increase by $1,250 due to this rate, which will be added to the charge at service stations.
In Neuquen capital, the municipality has already begun sending notifications to gas stations and the application in Centenary, Plotter, Cutral Co and Villa Pehuenia. In the region, San Martín de los Andes was the first to implement it.
These are added to districts of the Province of Buenos Aires that are already applying the rate such as Tigre, Escobar, Pilar, José C. Paz, Moreno, Merlo, Ituzaingó, Hurlingham, Ezeiza, Almirante Brown, Lomas de Zamora, Lanús, Quilmes, Florencio Varela and Berazategui. In these cases, the rate varies between 1.5% and 2.5% of the price per liter of fuel, or is established as a fixed amount.
The mayor of Neuquén capital, Mariano Gaidoseeks to regionalize the road tax, since if it is not implemented in nearby neighboring cities, it can become “a measure of unfair and inequitable competition between service stations.”
For its part, Fernando SchpolianskySecretary of Finance, Resources and Citizen Protection of the Municipality of Neuquén, said: “Everything arises from the elimination of the Transportation Compensation Fund for the entire interior of the country, a unilateral decision by the National Government that was applied in December and that left us without these funds that corresponded to the city to sustain the public transportation system.”
The official assured that “all municipal governments, since the elimination of the fund, are looking for alternative sources of financing” and that this rate arose “because In the province of Buenos Aires there are 19 municipalities that are charging it”.
“Service stations throughout the country charge two national taxes on the value of the liter of fuel: on liquid fuels and the carbon dioxide tax. The Nation collects them in all cities, but it stopped sharing them with the provinces and therefore with the municipalities,” he noted.
“Now then they must also collect the municipal urban mobility rate,” he added.
The measure already has resistance from 13 chambers of commerce in the province of Neuquén. For example, the Federation of Neuquén Business Entities (Feen) issued a statement and pointed out that although the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) of Neuquén rejected the precautionary measure not to charge the fee in San Martín de los Andes, it did give rise to deal with the unconstitutionality action.
The organization requested that the constitutionality be reviewed because there are already rates and taxes that are charged on fuels, considering “the flagrant lack of the principle of ‘fiscal federalism’ which, among other things, determines the obligation of jurisdictions to agree on a fiscal policy “that it is for the benefit of the common people and does not overlap or multiply taxes of a similar nature.”
The governor of Neuquén, Rolando FigueroaFor his part, he stressed that “each municipality is free to do so, the road tax is a municipal issue. The municipalities are underfunded with funds for transportation and today that fund is being directed to the federal capital.”
And he considered: “What are the mayors going to do if they don’t have that fund? Somehow we have to have transportation.”
“It always happens with some measures, to look good only with the people, but it has nothing to do with the good administration of public resources,” he assured.
“That is why every time a mayor, with courage, faces the problems, being clear to the citizens, we accompany them. The municipalities have advanced on this path, to be able to finance all this in a clearly tax concept linked to the provision of well-being to the neighbors, of each of the communities,” he concluded.
