Provided by the Society of Independent
Gasoline Marketers of America

Victories in the end of the 2003-04 Congress

For most of 2003 and 2004, Congress seemed to accomplish very little. Budgets weren’t adopted, appropriations bills weren’t passed and major pieces of important legislation simply stalled. Included in that category were a major Energy Bill, legislation to renew the Federal Highway Program, a bill to bring U.S. tax law into compliance with trade agreements and thereby end sanctions against U.S. exports, and a re-write of the nation’s Intelligence laws. Week after week, there were reports about progress, but no final decisions. The wheels were turning, the gears were intermeshing, but there was no output.

That was the picture even at the time of last fall’s election — appropriations to fund most of the government for the year that had begun Oct. 1, 2004 still hadn’t passed Congress.

Yet almost miraculously, in the last three months of 2004 — including a series of one- and two-day “lame duck” sessions — a whole bunch of contentious issues were resolved, mostly by overwhelmingly favorable votes. Not everything was taken care of — energy legislation and the Highway Bill were passed on to the next Congress to resolve. But from a marketer’s perspective, the issues that were resolved — mostly favorably — in the months of October, November, and December are impressive:

• The export tax bill included changes to diesel fuel tax provisions, including changes to excise taxes on rail and barge diesel, largely designed to help prevent tax avoidance.
  
• The export tax bill also included changes to gasoline excise taxes, including an “ultimate vendor” provision for sales to tax-exempt entities, also designed to help prevent tax avoidance.
  
• It included changes to ethanol tax incentives, moving the cost from the Highway Trust Fund to the General Fund, and changes in how the incentive is administered to accomplish that objective and to ensure that the incentive applies only to gasoline that is actually blended.
  
• It created a new biodiesel tax incentive.
  
• The same bill provided for a three-year suspension of the Special Occupational Tax, a per-store tax paid by retailers of beer, wine and alcoholic beverages to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
  
• When all remaining appropriations bills were rolled into a single omnibus spending bill and passed in a lame duck session, the decision to allow the Department of Labor’s new overtime rules to go fully into effect was finalized.
  
• Even the Intelligence Reform bill contained a victory for marketers — a provision to require that state-issued drivers licenses and identification cards be manufactured in a common machine-readable format that will help retailers automate their compliance with rules for sales of age-restricted products.

Many issues of importance to motor fuel marketers and convenience-store retailers remain to be resolved by the 2005-06 Congress. High on the list is the issue of boutique fuels. Despite the remaining issues, though, marketers can feel good about how the last Congress ended.