Money Main Focus During Hearing On Highway Tolls
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Money Main Focus During Hearing On Highway Tolls
By Karin Crompton
Published on 2/24/2009
Hartford – If the initial public debate regarding highway tolls is any indication of how the conversation will be framed, two themes emerged during a public hearing of the state legislature’s Transportation Committee on Monday.
The first was fairness. Many take umbrage at the idea that Connecticut’s residents pay to maintain roads that out-of-state drivers travel for “free,” all the while paying tolls to our neighboring states.
The second was money. With a faltering economy and a state transportation fund hit hard by declines in driving and gas prices – and thus, a decline in revenue – committee members and those who testified during the lengthy hearing spoke often of a need to find new revenue streams.
“There is a need for additional revenue sources, and that’s exactly why we undertook this study,” Sen. Donald DeFronzo, co-chairman of the committee, said about a $1.2 million tolls study commissioned by the state whose results were unveiled last week.
The study consultant, Cambridge Systematics Inc., told members of the state Transportation Strategy Board last week that Connecticut will need to figure out the reason why it would consider bringing tolls back. Aside from revenue, the other motivation is usually to reduce congestion, making drivers pay more to drive during the busiest times.
But congestion mitigation was a secondary concern Monday.
“We have over 30,000 visitors coming into our state to go to the casinos,” Sen. Edith Prague said to kick off testimony. “They use our roads, they use our services, and that’s OK. But they don’t pay anything in return. We in the state are struggling in this tough economic time to balance our budget. We have one source of revenue that we have not yet tapped, and that’s putting gateway tolls back on our roads.”
Prague referred to the idea of putting tolls only at the state’s border to try to capture fees primarily from out-of-state drivers. That type of tolling was seen Monday as the most likely scenario, at least initially, for Connecticut.
The biggest objection voiced to the border-toll approach is its impact on residents who cross state lines to get to work each day. According to the tolls study, border tolls do not help with congestion but potentially raise billions (the study did not factor toll construction and maintenance into its figures, however, so the numbers should not be seen as net revenue projections).
Most members of the Transportation Committee who spoke Monday said they support electronic tolling, in which there are no tollbooths and vehicles continue driving at speed. But others, who remain unconvinced, pointed out that public opinion largely runs against the concept.
“I certainly have gotten a lot of feedback on this issue, probably on a par with a lot of the more contentious issues we’ve had,” said state Sen. Toni Boucher. “Most of it has been negative, and strongly negative.”
State Rep. Steven Mikutel, D-Griswold, committee vice chairman, said the public will not accept tolls while the gas tax remains high and half the money in the state’s Special Transportation Fund remains in the General Fund rather than going toward transportation projects.
“If this committee decides to go forward (with tolls), the only way I could ever justify it is to use those monies for a dedicated transportation fund,” Mikutel said. “I don’t think the general public would support any other kind of proposal. In fact, I think my constituents would be outraged if they thought we were going to use this as another candy bag to support state spending.”
The president of the Connecticut Messenger Courier Association, Kevin Maloney, told the committee that tolling would hurt a state already handicapped by one of the highest gas taxes in the country. He asked at what point adding tolls on top of the proposed increase in drivers’ license fees and registration “renders our state at large uncompetitive?”
Though the old tollbooth structures are not considered a part of the most recent debate, Maloney and a private citizen who spoke Monday referred to the potential safety impacts of tollbooths. Connecticut tore down its tollbooths after a fatal accident in 1983.
Maloney conceded that Connecticut will need to find a way to make up for the declining revenue for transportation and infrastructure projects – and to do it quicker than usual.
“I submit to you that if we wait 10 years to address this problem, we are going to be in deep, deep trouble,” Maloney said. “Short of a cure for cancer, it shouldn’t take 10 years to study anything. But that seems to be the accepted way of doing things in this state, particularly infrastructure. It will choke us economically if we don’t act.”
Gerald Baseel, an IBM client executive, updated the committee on tolling technology being used in other parts of the world – or what the company and others refer to as “intelligent transportation systems.”
Baseel said a 2006 pilot program of “dynamic tolling” in Stockholm faced 65 percent opposition going in; after seven months, Baseel said, the initiative received 62-percent approval at a referendum.
Baseel said the program reduced overall traffic by 20 percent, lowered the wait times to get in and out of the city by 25 percent, and reduced emissions by 12 percent in the city.
If the legislature does pass a bill to bring tolls back, it will likely take years before any systems are built, whether as highway cameras or transponder systems that read information off of cars like the E-ZPASS system.
But Prague, and others, said they see the handful of bills proposed as the beginning of a new way of thinking about raising money.
“This is just the beginning,” Prague said. “It’ll take us time to put the system in place and have it as we want to have it. But we have to begin. We have to start with supporting the issue of tolls and then go from there.”
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