User taxes don’t function properly when some users are able to avoid the tax. Fuel taxes and vehicle fees are two major sources of revenue for Nevada’s State Highway Fund. This makes sense. Officials use the State Highway Fund to build and maintain roads for vehicles. ADVERTISEMENT Nevada Department of Transportation Director Tracy Larkin Thomason recently provided the Joint Interim Standing Committee on Growth and Infrastructure an overview of transportation funding . Larkin Thomason said her department needs between $1.6 billion to $2 billion annually over the next decade. That’s a big number, and, unsurprisingly, NDOT is worried about hitting it. It’s the rare government agency that will ever say it’s well-funded. But, in this case, it’s understandable. Construction costs are through the roof, and new vehicles are generally more fuel efficient. Electric vehicles avoid the gasoline tax entirely. “The fast adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles in the past several years is expected to increase and resume the dip on our fuel tax revenues,” Larkin Thomason told the committee. NDOT says that the State Highway Fund currently receives about 0.9 cents per mile driven. NDOT projects it could receive only around 0.3 cents per mile driven by 2050. That’s a major decrease. If the government takes its thumb off the scale, EVs may not continue to grow in popularity. But there remains a glaring problem. The gasoline tax is supposed to ensure that all road users pay for road construction. EVs are freeloading. “Essentially, our choices to meet this are to find ways to increase the amount of revenue that’s going into the Highway Fund or that is dedicated to transportation, increase some of the other fees that are dedicated to transportation or increase General Fund revenue for some of these purposes,” Assemblyman Howard Watts said at the meeting.