People are finding their budgets pinched.

If Wednesday’s price for unleaded regular gasoline doesn’t change, Rena Wilkins figures she’ll be giving Big Oil an extra $500 a year.

“I think they’re terrible,” she said of the pump prices posted at Wal-Mart’s Optima station in Auburn. “They’re outrageous.”

Still, at $1.84 with a discount, $1.87 without, they were cheaper than anyplace else around.

That’s why Wilkins was where she was late Wednesday morning. She’d been checking other stations. She was filling up her minivan at Optima because “it’s so much cheaper.”

The Auburn woman said the recent run-up in gasoline prices has added $10 to her fuel bill each week.

“It’s worse for my husband,” she noted. “He works in Portland.”

Lorrie Young of Poland said high gas prices have led her and her husband to talk about trading in their Jeep Cherokee. She estimates the SUV gets between 13 and 16 miles per gallon.

Her weekly fuel bill has gone from about $30 to nearly $60, she said while pumping $10 worth at the Optima station.

“It’s so comfortable, though,” Young notes of the vehicle.

Do some carpooling

She’s trying to find ways to offset the extra spending on gas. She encourages her kids to find ways to carpool with others, for example.

And belt-tightening isn’t anything new for her, Young added. “I’m always cutting back.”

Still, she said, as gas nears $2 per gallon, it’s “definitely putting people in a tighter spot.”

Jim Grimmel flatly predicts that the price of regular will top $2 by summer, if not sooner. He thinks a CNN radio report he heard that speculated gas would be $2.04 per gallon will prove true.

He chuckles when he remembers thinking that when gas hit $1.25 a gallon a few years back that that had to be the maximum.

Grimmel runs Grimmel’s Service Station on Lisbon Street. It’s one of those old-fashioned, full service places where Grimmel or one of his workers will fill a customer’s tank, check their oil and wash their windshield. To help cover that cost, he charges a few pennies more per gallon than some outlets, but Wednesday, his $1.96 matched the self-serve Mobil a few blocks up the street.

He’s been pumping gas for 44 years now, since he was still in high school.

“I remember when I started, gas was 19-cents a gallon, five gallons for a buck,” he said. “We could go to Old Orchard Beach and back and keep going for the rest of the week on $2.”

Grimmel said the recent price spike has hurt his older customers, those on fixed incomes, the most, but quickly added that no one is benefiting from higher costs “except OPEC.”

Politics at the pump

He faults President George W. Bush for not convincing U.S. trade partner Mexico to open its oil spigots in order to offset OPEC-induced global shortages, which have led to higher per-barrel prices.

“It’s all politics,” Grimmel contends.

“He’s (Bush) got a deal with the Saudis. Just before the election, oil prices will go down,” Grimmel forecasts. He says the president will take – or get – credit for the drop in oil prices, then point to figures showing that the economy grew over the past year.

“Those numbers will be up because gas prices were up. That means everything else went up, too. Your shirt, your milk, your butter, everything gets to the store riding in something powered by gasoline,” Grimmel figures.

Politics or not, the gas prices are “hurting me, just like everybody else,” said Dan Leonas.

The hurt might be a more in his case, though.

Leonas runs 10 taxis under the City Cab banner and five more as 2-in-1 Cab. His fuel costs are soaring.

Unlike oil companies, though, he can’t just raise his rates to offset the fuel cost. Because his cabs are licensed by the Lewiston and Auburn city councils, he’d have to go back to them to seek a rate change. Right now, he doesn’t plan to do that, but he might have to.

“It cost me $40 to fill up now,” he says. “It was $20 a year ago.”

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