NOTHING NEUTRAL WITH TOBIN TOLLS
The hack phrase of the week is “revenue-neutral,” as in, “Pay no attention to the fact that we’re surreptitiously doubling the number of toll-collecting devices on the northbound side of the Tobin Bridge, it will all work out to be ‘revenue-neutral.’ ”
Yeah, right. That’s why the payroll Charlies were keeping it secret — because they’re not planning to grab millions of more bucks off it.
Some commuters noted the construction of the new “gantries” (as in crooked movie preacher Elmer Gantry) and tipped off the press. The Department of Transportation flak-catcher, Tom Tinlin, was dispatched to apologize.
Does that name ring a bell — Tom Tinlin? He’s an old Mumbles Menino City Hall hack out of Southie. Now makes $151,267 a year at a new trough. Another nationwide search. Tinlin apologized.
“It’s not like we’re coming in the middle of the night and trying to do something sneaky.”
Of course not. This is the Tobin Bridge. It was built in the late 1940s, and the toll booths were supposed to come down when the bonds were paid off … in 1978. Those tolls were supposed to be “sunsetted,” another one of those hack weasel words.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Back in 1988, the Mass Pike was about to pull a Tobin — pay off its bonds and go out of business. The Pike employees’ newsletter congratulated the hack workforce on the “superb condition” of the roadway. Then they realized, holy bleep, if we pay off the bonds, we’ll all have to give up our phony baloney jobs!
Suddenly, the Pike chairman, a dimwitted ex-state senator, was running around the state with TV crews (back when people actually watched local TV news) pointing under Pike bridges and yelling, “Look at that pebble that just fell down from the bridge!”
Dammit, they wanted to take down the toll booths, but instead they had to issue new bonds, and the only way to pay them was by … not only not getting rid of the tolls, but by quintupling them, from a quarter to $1.25. Can someone say, “revenue-neutral”?
But time passes, and a new Pike crisis loomed. The bonds that paid for the western Pike were about to be retired, next January. But not to worry — Tinlin wrote this week that the hackerama has determined that I-90 inexplicably continues to fall apart — 240 of 250 bridges “were rated in a condition below good,” for instance.
“It is recommended,” the Southie hack wrote, “that the tolls … remain.”
It’s baffling how our highways can always be in such wretched shape, considering that the Reason Foundation issued a report saying that the Bay State annually spends $675,000 per mile on its roads, compared to an average of $145,000 for the other 49 states.
Those stats came out two years ago, when the hacks were pushing to institute automatic gas tax increases. Those extra billions were supposed to be “earmarked” for the “crumbling infrastructure.” Turned out, 49 percent of the “earmarked” funds would have actually gone to such boondoggles as the MBTA and its pension funds.
Revenue-neutral is what it is, unless you’re hacked up, which all of them are. Listen to Howie 3-7 p.m. on WRKO AM 680.