Last week, Governor Jay Inslee finally signed a $16 billion transportation package after accepting a painful compromise. Under the terms of that compromise, if the governor uses an executive order to implement a clean fuel standard—a type of climate policy that California, Oregon, and British Columbia have already adopted—the new legislation will stick a knife in transit (by siphoning funding away from mass transit and showering that money on roads).

But the final transportation deal stuck knives in other places, too. Consider electric vehicles: While Inslee's initial proposals for electric vehicles encouraged increased funding for EV charging stations, the final piece of legislation now takes money from electric vehicle owners and sends it to highways.

Here's how that bit of business goes:

Each year, electric vehicle owners pony up $100 for vehicle registration renewal. The new legislation increases that annual registration fee from $100 to $150. That might not seem like a lot of money when you consider the cost of something like a Tesla Model S, but it amounts to a different kind of insult for some EV drivers when they think about where that extra $50 is going.

Originally, the additional $50 was supposed to fund EV charging stations. But the final version of the transportation package nixed that idea. Instead, the transportation package sends the first $1 million of EV registration fees to the state's multimodal transportation fund, an account used for things like mass transit and rail (in addition to highways). After a $1 million cap is reached, however, fees collected from electric vehicle drivers go to a motor vehicle fund, an account limited "to the support of state, city and county highway maintenance and construction" and other highway-related activities.

Stephen Johnson, president of the Seattle Electric Vehicle Association, said he doesn't mind paying the extra $50 if it goes back into building up more renewable infrastructure. But sending any revenue after $1 million to highways "was different than what Inslee had proposed, so we’re kind of disappointed by that," he said. "We would like to see that extra $50 continue to go toward public charging infrastructure."

The primary argument against Johnson's case rests on how highways are funded: the gas tax. Because EV drivers don't pay a gas tax, the argument goes that they're spared the burden of paying for gas-tax-funded highways.

Another way of looking at it is that the new transportation package effectively levies a new fee on electric vehicle drivers for not using gasoline.

That said, the transportation package does throw electric vehicles a small bone by mandating the creation of a public-private electric vehicle infrastructure pilot program.

And, meanwhile, the state's biggest polluters continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere tax-free.