The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
⏩ Dan Haar: For one CT toll, it’s a New York state of mind.
It’s the highway toll equivalent of President Donald Trump declaring Mexico will pay for the border wall.
New Yorkers will help pay Connecticut tolls without ever driving to, or from, Connecticut, if Gov. Ned Lamont has his way.
How’s that possible? Simple geography. They will be in Connecticut for a 1.3mile stretch of Interstate 684 that pases through a remote corner of Greenwich. There’s no way to get to or from any other Connecticut or Greenwich road from that stretch. The nearest exit to the north is in Armonk, and to the south, the Westchester County Airport.
But that toll gantry would be in Connecticut, technically. And that’s good enough for Lamont, whose plan to toll 14 highway bridges, rolled out Thursday, includes a bridge along that stretch — right on the state line, over the Byram River.
Speaking of rivers, Lamont hatched the plan apparently without telling his new fishing buddy, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “We’re not going to do anything unless we do it in collaboration with New York and let me tell you, this will be on our next agenda,” Lamont said Thursday.
That’s not okay with Chris Burdick, the newly reelected supervisor of the town of Bedford, a few miles to the north.
“I think it’s atrocious and I find it offensive,” Burdick told me in a phone call exactly as Lamont was addressing the media and supporters in Hartford. “It looks as though this thing was snuck through.”
Burdick said he’ll join with others in Westchester — home of Cuomo — in fighting the toll. He’ll have plenty of company from Connecticut folks in places like West Hartford, West Haven and other locales whose highway bridges drew the Scarlet Letter T on Lamont’s map.
“This is very distrurbing,” said Burdick, a Democrat whose town includes Katonah and Bedford Hills. “We typically have a very good relationship with Connecticut and to just do this with no notice...zero contact, zero collaboration, zero consideration for the impacts it’s going to cause.”
As Lamont’s office sees it, the bridge is fair game for a toll. Connecticut is responsible for maintaining it and, spokesman Max Reiss said, the location was vetted by federal highway officials.
“It’s not like we just threw darts at projects,” Reiss said.
No, but the bridge in question needs a $12.9 million repair, the smallest job among the 14 tolled bridges in the Lamont plan, far, far smaller than most of them. There are some 300 highway bridges deemed “deficient” along Connecticut highways including Hartford’s crumbling I84 viaduct, with seven separate bridges needing repairs.
Reiss was unabashed. “Aren’t we supposed to minimize the impact on Connecticut residents? New York understands very well that Connecticut drivers help to support their infrastructure on a daily basis.”
Indeed we do, so maybe fair is fair. It does seem underhanded considering that whenever we pay a toll in New York or Massachusetts, we’re deciding to drive to those states, or at least through them in a meaningful way. You know, with things like highway exits, maybe a local gas station, grab a sandwich.
Motorists along I684 know they’re in Connecticut only because of two green signs, “Entering Greenwich” and “Leaving Greenwich.” Soon it might say, “Thank you for your 50 cents,” the likely price each way, based on Lamont’s plan — which needs approval from the Connecticut General Assembly.
Connecticut residents use I684 too — mostly people driving to and from I84 and the Danbury area — but they probably think they’re long gone from their home state when they’re south of Armonk.
Taking a step back, this charade illustrates why tolling individual bridges makes less sense than tolling whole highways. User fees are the right way to go and we need tolling desperately in Connecticut, so the bridge plan is way better than borrowing more money at double the cost of tolling to residents.
Still, it’s fundamentally unfair to make people who happen to pass a certain specific point every day pay more than their fair share. The money from this tolling plan will pool together in one pot to pay back a federal loan Connecticut hopes to get at about 2 percent interest. So it’s all for one and one for all — if the gantries are plentiful enough to spread the pain.
Lamont, of course, wanted to do that, with 50 or so gantries along four main highways in Connecticut: I95, I84, I91 and Route 15. That plan made more sense and raised more money — as much as $800 million, compared with about $300 million for the bridge plan. But he couldn’t generate enough support among weakknee lawmakers.
So now the governor, who lives in Greenwich, will look to the Empire State for an unwitting hand.
He recently gave Cuomo a framed Connecticut fishing license in thanks for their day out on a boat on Lake Ontario. Cuomo’s office didn’t respond with a comment on the I684 toll, but maybe he’ll want to trade in that fishing license for a Connecticut EZPass, the better to get a 20 percent discount while driving around in his own state.