Lamont: Climate initiative, truck taxes linked to expanded train service
WATERBURY — Gov. Ned Lamont on Wednesday tied plans for major rail improvements in the Naugatuck Valley with his proposals to reduce carbon emissions and create a mileage tax on trucks.
Speaking before about 100 people outside the Metro-North station here, the governor, flanked by a pair of his top commissioners, promised seven more trains a day and two-way rail service to the city and the region, which is growing despite the pandemic.
“Waterbury is happening,” Lamont said. “You see it in terms of everybody rediscovering it, the number of people moving here.”
He added that most of the influx up and down the Naugatuck Valley, to Waterbury, is from New York. “Over the past year, as miserable as it may have been, a lot of people realized Connecticut is an amazing place to be.”
He asked lawmakers and local officials to help him push for his regional Transportation Climate Initiative as well as the proposed mileage tax for heavy trucks. Both measures would provide funding for state transit projects and the regional TCI, as it’s called, would aim to reduce greenhouse gas and other emissions linked to asthma and other respiratory ailments that adversely affect city dwellers.
The TCI, raising prices for petroleum products wholesalers and hiking gasoline prices, is estimated to bring the state about $1 billion for transportation projects by 2032 as part of a multi-state initiative. The highway use tax is projected to raise $1 billion over five years.
The state needs that money, Lamont said, to pay for improvements such as the Waterbury train line.
“This is bipartisan,” Lamont said. “This is an initiative where we can make an enormous difference together. Look, I love steak and fries, but there is no such thing as a free lunch and we do have to find a way to pay for it.”
He said the initiatives would also address racial equity because urban children are disproportionately affected by air pollution.
“I think racial disparities or health care disparities are part of the public-health emergency,” Lamont said, stressing that COVID-19 makes it even more dangerous. “We see it in the numbers that Black and brown people are particularly hard hit.”
There are currently 15 daily trains servicing the Waterbury line. Lamont’s budget proposal includes seven more a day at an initial cost of about $1.2 million. There is currently a $116 million capital project underway, including new signals, bridge repairs and the construction of extra tracks to eventually accommodate two-way train traffic.
Waterbury Mayor Neil O’Leary said that while the pandemic caused a more than 80-percent drop in ridership along MetroNorth’s New Haven line, Waterbury line riders have remained at about 1,000 people a day, about 40 percent of capacity. The city led the state in January home sales, O’Leary said.
O’Leary said the train line from Waterbury to Bridgeport is a key to future development in the 19-town region. He’s hoping for freight train traffic to return in the not-todistant future. “There are so many people traveling to and from New York City here to the city of Waterbury, and the region, every day,” he said.
State Transportation Commissioner Joseph J. Giulietti noticed that the finished stone-and-paving plaza around the platform is not longer a dirt lot. “We recognize the importance of transportation,” he said to an assembled crowd.
Nearby, the reconstruction of the Interstate-84 and Route 8 cloverleaf, called the “mixmaster,” created a late-morning din.
Katie Dykes, commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said the initiatives are aimed at fighting climate change and providing cleaner air, not just raising money.
“These are solutions that are helping us to address environmental justice, racial inequality in our public health environment,” she said, stressing that the TCI would force the petroleum industry to help pay for cleaning the pollution caused by the combustion of gasoline and diesel field, and help the state move toward more electric transit options.
“Right here in Waterbury the air quality here is 17 percent worse than our suburban communities,” Dykes said. “It’s 44 percent worse than in our rural communities in this state. So this is an environmental justice issue and an opportunity as well.”
More than a third of the $1 billion anticipated from the TCI would go to cities such as Waterbury, Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford, which have experienced the brunt of the state’s air pollution problems, she and Lamont said.