Falling gasoline prices and the faltering U.S. economy could undermine voter support for a proposed tax hike funding mass transportation projects from Belen to Taos, including the Rail Runner Express commuter train, but tax opponents and advocates alike say they have no idea how the ballot measure in two newly formed regional transit districts will fare in Tuesday’s election.

“You got me,” said John Onstad, who is helping spearhead a move in Santa Fe to defeat the tax hike in the four-county North Central Regional Transit District. “It’s going to be close.”

Similarly, said Greg Payne, director of Albuquerque’s transit department, “I suspect it will go through” in the three counties of the Rio Metro Regional Transit District, “but I wouldn’t be surprised, either, if it came up a little short.”

The measure up for approval in both transit districts was designed to be politically palatable, according to Wayne Ake, chairman of the Rio Metro board. It asks voters to approve a one-eighth-percent gross receipts tax in the affected counties — 12.5 cents on every $100 purchase, excluding food and medical supplies — to help expand bus service and to defray the Rail Runner’s operating costs.

But conditions have changed dramatically since the tax plan was being put together in midsummer, complicating the prospects for the transit tax, according to at least one veteran of such votes.

“I’m optimistic where I ordinarily wouldn’t be,” said Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez. Tax-hike propositions typically have an uphill struggle, he said, and the outlook should be even worse now that the U.S. economy is in shambles.

But the summer’s gasoline price spike is fresh enough in people’s minds that they may be inclined to vote for the tax, Chavez said. “We’ve gotten a real wake-up call in the last six months regarding our addiction to foreign oil,” he said, and chipping in a small amount to improve public transportation throughout north-central New Mexico shouldn’t be hard for voters to accept. “This is a bit of self-help,” he said.

The strong interest in the Rail Runner itself will affect the vote, too, Chavez said. “I always thought the Rail Runner would languish until it stretched to Santa Fe. But it’s been a success from day one, and I expect in January or February it’s really going to explode.” People who plan to use the train for work or pleasure will vote for the tax, he said, and those numbers seem to be growing.

“I think it’s going to pass,” Chavez said.

The Rio Metro tax in Bernalillo, Sandoval and Valencia counties is expected to raise $19 million a year, while the tax from the North Central district counties of Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Rio Arriba and Taos would bring in $8 million a year.

As the Independent reported earlier this year, both tax measures are critical to the Rail Runner Express. When train service extends this winter from Bernalillo to Santa Fe, it will boost the train’s operating cost to some $20 million annually. The new tax is slated to pick up more than half the tab — $11.6 million in the first year — state Department of Transportation officials say.

If one or both tax measures fail, the state will have to look elsewhere for the missing millions. Department of Transportation spokesman S.U. Mahesh told the Independent in August that the Rail Runner has one year left of start-up funding from the federal government. Without the tax revenue, he said, “We’ll be looking wherever we can to get the money for the trains without affecting our other (state transportation) projects.”

While half the Rio Metro tax, if approved, would support the Rail Runner, the other half — some $9.4 million the first year, rising to more than $13 million in the future — would be used to beef up bus service in Albuquerque and the three-county area.

Likewise, half the tax raised in Santa Fe County would go to the train — estimated at about $2.2 million a year. The remainder of Santa Fe’s tax revenue, plus all the tax from the three other counties in the North Central transit district, would be spent to improve bus service to, from and around Santa Fe.

In northern New Mexico, there seems to be strong support for the plan, said Josette Lucero, executive director of the North Central transit district. “We’ve been out to the communities, going to public meetings, talking to people,” she said. “People don’t like any taxes, but they’re responding to that this one is needed. They want to pay for something that’s needed and that benefits the people.”

Ake, the Rio Metro chairman, is also mayor of Bosque Farms, and talking to his neighbors in Valencia County gives him the sense the tax will pass, if narrowly.

“Nobody likes taxes,” he said, “but it seems like a lot of people have changed their habits” since gas prices topped $4 a gallon in parts of rural New Mexico this summer. People he knows are driving less, and some have even sold off a car or two. Though the gas price is now less than $2.50 in the Albuquerque area, he and others expect it to rise again, Ake said, and that could affect the vote.

Joanne McIntire, who until this week has been working on transportation and urban growth projects with the group 1,000 Friends of New Mexico, said she senses the tax will pass, regardless of the state of the economy.

“This is an era of change,” she said, and residents of central New Mexico are embracing the regional transportation system that has the Rail Runner as its backbone. For some people, buses and trains will become an economic necessity, McIntire said, but others will vote for the tax hike because public transportation represents a more sustainable future.

Payne, the head of ABQ Ride, said that even as gasoline prices began easing from their peak in July, ridership on the city’s bus lines continued to rise. September was a record month for boardings, he said, and October appears to be just slightly behind. Ridership on the city’s West Side route, the Blue Line, jumped 80 percent after a transit center opened near Cibola High School in September, he said.

“It’s pretty tough out there economically,” Payne said, “but I don’t know that’s going to translate into opposition” to the tax.

There hasn’t been a lot of organized opposition to the tax measures. The Rio Grande Foundation in Albuquerque has written op-ed pieces pointing out that the steady pace of small increases has boosted Albuquerque’s gross receipts tax by more than 20 percent since 1999, and generally ruing the state’s decision to build the Rail Runner in the first place.

In Santa Fe, John Onstad and others have been more active, putting up billboards and writing op-ed pieces to the Santa Fe New Mexican, but he isn’t optimistic about killing the tax proposal. “I think it’s going to be close,” with voters falling into what he called “predictable patterns.” Conservatives see the government sticking its hand into people’s wallets, while liberals see it as benefiting the environment and the poor, he said.

“I think it’s going to be close,” Onstad said. But either way, “we still have the Rail Runner,” which he thinks should never have been built, while the regional bus system is a boondoggle, he said.

Two recent Rail Runner riders said they had already voted for the tax. Nick Tobey, a retired utility worker who lives in the Sandoval County village of San Ysidro, said he thinks public transportation “is going to get more and more important as time goes on,” and the small sales tax he would pay is an easy contribution to make.