California’s latest gas-tax hike lands as voters this week rejected a range of local tax-hike measures statewide, including, apparently, in LA County, San Diego, San Francisco and Riverside.

State residents are sick of paying ever-higher prices for shoddy government services, payouts to Dem-adjacent unions and nonprofit groups and the climate fever dreams of the left.

Indeed: A recent poll by The California Post found the cost of living is the No. 1 issue of concern for state residents.

Yet here we are, absorbing yet another hike in the gas tax — this one rolled out on autopilot thanks to Dem policy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom sent notice this week that California’s gas tax will climb by another 2 cents per gallon on July 1. 

This, at a time when gas prices in California routinely top $6 per gallon — generally $2 more than in other states.

Tim Stewart, president of the US Oil & Gas Association, also warns that the state’s “cap and invest” scheme will drive gas-tax costs higher this year — and perhaps add a dollar a gallon, in new taxes alone, by 2030.

Enough, already. 

Californians are fed up, tapped out, and sick of being put last by establishment politicians statewide. 

They want common sense in government, as this week’s voting proves. 

Instead, they get arrogance, gluttony and automatic gas-tax hikes like the one set to smack motorists next month.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature in 2017 adopted SB 1, a measure that raises the state’s gas tax every July 1 based on inflation. 

The legislation also hiked the state’s base gasoline excise tax by 12 cents a gallon, raised the diesel tax and inflated vehicle registration fees, with proceeds earmarked for transportation projects.

The law allowed Brown and legislators to say they’d addressed the state’s woeful record on transit and road maintenance without dipping into state general fund dollars that Sacramento prefers to lavish on social causes and giveaways to unions and other Dem supporters.

And raising the cost of gas, which in turn helps depress driving, was a feature of the legislation, not a bug — part of a larger effort to enforce green orthodoxy and cement Democrats’ power.

Newsom, Brown and legislators have, for instance: demonized fossil fuels, effectively shuttered a large swath of the state’s domestic oil industry, imposed a cap-and-trade (now cap-and-invest) regime to charge carbon emitters for doing business and more. 

It’s all a vast, costly, oppressive mess.

And for what? 

Green: the virtue-signaling, of course, along with cycles of campaign cash from those who prosper from climate zeal.

It’s wretched, and it’s no wonder so many Californians, even in this deep blue state, voted for change on June 2.