Lawmakers attack PennDOT plan to toll interstate bridges
HARRISBURG — Trucking companies in Berks County, commuters in the Harrisburg area and businesses in tiny Brookville, Jefferson County, will all pay the price if the state goes through with a plan to toll nine interstate bridges, Republican lawmakers said Thursday.
“Are we creating winners and losers with the way that we are tolling the bridges? I think that we are,” Montgomery County state Sen. Robert Mensch said at a news conference to unveil proposed legislation that would stop the plan.
Among the nine bridges is one on Interstate 78 over Maiden Creek in Greenwich Township, just north of Mensch’s district. Mensch said Reading-area trucking companies asked “why they would be punished” by paying to cross the bridge to get to their markets.
Other senators highlighted financial pain they said tolling would cause in their areas.
“I have heard a very loud cry” concerning the potential toll on the I-83 South Bridge crossing the
Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Sen. Mike Regan of York County said.
“Some of the families who live in my district would not only have one, not two, but three family members who cross that bridge two times on a daily basis,” Regan said. “Now they are going to pay $500, $1,000, $1,500 a year additionally.”
State Sen. Crish Dush of Jefferson County said that if the Interstate 80 NorthFork Bridge — which crosses the NorthFork Red Bank Creek — is tolled, trucks will use nearby exits to detour and travel on Main Street in nearby Brookville, which has a population of about 5,000.
“What this action does to this specific town, what it will do, no amount of studies or ideas of how to mitigate are going to fix that problem,” Dush said.
PennDOT said collected tolls would go toward the cost of construction projects on the bridges, which is expected to be a combined $2.2 billion.
But Republicans said the proposal was generated in “sneaky” fashion using the Public-Private Transportation Partnership board. The bill from Sen. Wayne Langerholc of Cambria County would stop the tolling proposal, increase legislative oversight of the board and allow for more public input, among other things.
The administration of Gov. Tom Wolf opposes the bill.
In a statement, PennDOT said it adds unnecessary and duplicative bureaucracy and “politicizes a process designed to foster innovation and efficient public-private collaboration.”
Transportation Secretary Yassmin Gramian has said the aging bridges need major work, and PennDOT needs billions of dollars more to keep up with its public safety obligations.
The tolls would be $1-$2, probably cover both directions, and last from the start of construction in 2023 for three or four years until construction is finished, Gramian said.