The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Lamont transit group all in on tolls
A passel of progressive ideas came out of Gov.elect Ned Lamont’s working group on transportation Wednesday morning and along with them, the group called for a “tolling authority” in Lamont’s first six months in office — with highway tolls on all cars and trucks.
That adds pressure on Lamont, who has repeatedly said he wants to see tolling on long-haul trucks only, and said that again Wednesday.
Everyone in the group agreed on the need for tolls except one: New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, who cast the sole vote against broad tolling, sources said. Stewart was not at the meeting at Bradley International Airport where the group presented its ideas.
The group didn’t offer any specifics. It called for a possible increase in the gasoline tax, without numbers.
The tax is about 50 cents a gallon including a 25 cent levy plus a wholesale charge.
“We have to fix our roads,” said James Travers, bureau chief for transportation, traffic and parking for the city of Stamford, a member of the transition group for transportation. “Our investment in roadways is
beyond anything that can be sustained with existing revenues.”
“We have been lucky that we haven’t has a Mianus River Bridge collapse,” Travers said, referring to the Interstate 95 bridge collapse that killed three in 1983.
Later in the day, Lamont said a tolling authority “sounds like another piece of bureaucracy, I don’t think we need that right now.”
He stopped short of vowing to veto a broad tolling bill, but added, “That’s their recommendation, the legislature will have some thoughts on this but my thought is what I told people for six months. Let’s start with tractor-trailer trucks.”
The tolls issue, along with gas taxes, will almost certainly wash over a broad and important discussion about ways to improve Connecticut’s public transit and transportation systems. Some of it, members of the working committee said, could save money in the long run and make the need for added revenues less severe.
But critics responded quickly, starting with Sen. Len Fasano, R-North Haven, the Senate Republican
leader. He issued a statement that covered many of the proposals by the 15 Lamont transition committees presenting their ideas this week.
“I’m trying very hard to give Gov.-elect Lamont the benefit of the doubt and not rush to judgment,” Fasano said in the written release. “However, the policy proposals that have emerged from many of his transition team meetings, including today’s proposal to toll all cars and increase the gas tax, are extremely concerning. These ideas look like Dan Malloy 2.0 and then some. They include massive tax increases, massive increases in spending and massive new promises – at a time when our state cannot even uphold the promises we have already made to residents.”
The unfortunate result is that amid shrill arguments about money — obviously important — Connecticut will lose ground in its slow move toward creating rational transportation systems that help the economy.
For example, the committee called for speeding up the hiring process at the state Department of Transportation, where some 500 jobs are funded but not filled. That saves money in the short term but some experts believe
the state would spend less on big transportation projects, and get them done faster, if it brought more design and engineering work back inhouse to the DOT.
In a draft report that’s not yet public, the transportation group also named several innovations aimed at a greener system. That includes a strategic plan for transitoriented development — the idea of coordinating zoning and other efforts around less energy-intensive ways of moving people around.
To that end, the committee called for a new “transportation systems working group” to help bubble up good ideas and to coordinate efforts across state agencies. For example, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection may work on land remediation at a place that could work for development that advances train transit along the Metro-North route — but there’s no formal way for those projects to align.
That working group would also have a “business advisory subcommittee,” which could, in addition to offering ideas, help come up with private money.
And the group called for a quasi-public “Transit Corridor Development Authority” to help development along transit lines.
The group is dominated by municipal and transportation officials including co-chairman Kevin Dillon, head of the Connecticut Airport Authority. He spoke about expanding the reach of the Connecticut Aviation Authority, perhaps to include oversight of Tweed-New Haven Airport, the better to coordinate if Tweed were to expand commercial service.
But tolls and taxes will emerge as the hot-button issue and all the ideas about Connecticut finally joining the 21st century are destined to be lost in that din — unless they can happen at little or no cost. In philosophy, the group advances a central concept articulated by Rep. Tony Guerrera, DRocky Hill, who lost in his bid for the state Senate.
“For every dollar that you spend on transportation infrastructure, the return to the economy is double that,” said Guerrera, a leading proponent of tolls.
As Melissa KaplanMacey, co-chair of the group and a vice president and Connecticut director at the tri-state Regional Plan Association, put it, “All these great ideas, how are we going to pay for it?”