The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
A déjà vu on tolls, or the road to nowhere
As my car approached the Sikorsky Bridge on the Merritt Parkway, linking Stratford and Milford, Wednesday morning, I had a flashback to 1987 and toll booths. Remember tossing coins into those metal baskets or, if you didn’t have the exact change, handing cash to a toll collector?
At the time, I was a reporter at the New Haven Register and drove that route every work day. To save money I bought a little black plate (I think it cost $50 at the Motor Vehicle Department) that attached to the car’s front bumper and allowed me to cruise through the toll. A rustic EZPass of sorts. I thought it was cool.
For all this heated debate about tolls in Connecticut, it’s forgotten that once we did have tolls. For quite a while.
Aside from turnpike tolls by private contractors going back to the late 1700s, more modern versions came with the parkway tolls in 1939 and in the mid1950s with construction of the 129mile Connecticut Turnpike and eight toll plazas. This became Interstate95.
In 1983, the Legislature decided to remove those tolls, as well as ones at three Hartfordarea bridges, prompted by a horrific accident that killed six people at the Stratford toll plaza that year. On June 24, 1988 tolls closed on the Merritt and Wilbur Cross Parkways, 49 years after opening.
(Trivia tidbit: The last toll in Connecticut was paid on April 28, 1989 at the Charter Oak Bridge in Hartford by William Thornton, president of the Manchester Sand & Gravel Company. He was the first person to pay the toll, at age 13, when the bridge opened in 1942.)
On Wednesday morning, I was once again crossing the Sikorsky bridge on my way to the New Haven Register, this time for a Hearst Media Group Editorial Board meeting with Senate Republican Leader Len Fasano. You can guess the topic.
It has been a frothing time of competing plans — tolls/no tolls/truckonlytolls — raised and shot down, sometimes within hours.
Turns out, state residents also have strong feelings about the subject and want the politicians to listen. My column last week, “Let’s hear from the people on tolls,” drew quite a reaction from readers — both for and against — and I’d like to give them a chance to be heard.
“Every time I hit a pothole or look at the bridges in disrepair, what needs to be done, I’m in favor of tolls and a higher gas tax. If we want good roads and bridges, we need to pay for them,” wrote Harvey Paulin of Derby, a selfdescribed senior citizen and “first time replyer.”
Bernard Waleski of Shelton is not convinced. “This reads like a press release from Governor Lamont’s office,” he said of my column. “The legislature’s problem is spending not generating money. No tolls.”
Elizabeth Broncati of Norwalk wants “nothing to do with tolls.” They are the bane “of driver’s existence, especially I95 in Fairfield County. In fact, maybe this is the time the rest of the state pays more for highways, instead of Fairfield County again footing the bill for the rest of the state.”
Tolls are a wallet — and trust — issue for Mike Kennedy of Bridgeport. “My wife makes a reverse commute to West Hartford every day from Bridgeport. ... This would put a huge burden on her and our income,” he wrote. “We have one of the highest gas taxes in the nation to support our roads. Yet no one ever looks into where that money has gone and continues to go. Even with the legislature creating a lockbox to protect the gas tax money, the state still found a way to spend those tax dollars on things other than roads. I have no reason to believe that any money collected from taxes will ever be used to finance transportation projects.”
A lifelong resident, he “believes Connecticut has not changed for the better.”
Oversight of transportation projects is also a concern for Martin Katz of Wilton. “CT2030 (Gov. Lamont’s plan) is a comprehensive plan for infrastructure improvements that have been neglected for years. But what is the ‘plan’ to manage these projects? ... Most residents have no confidence in CT to implement cost effective improvements . ... Residents don’t want another User Tax that has no end in sight!”
Carol Salvato of Wilton sees tolls as “inevitable.” “I am in favor of tolls with a 75 percent discount locked in for CT residents for 50 years and a sealed tight lockbox for proceeds. We pay tolls in all of the states for road maintenance and if we don’t institute tolls for CT we will pay through taxation for repairs anyway. .. I don’t want tolls either, but my practical mind dictates the necessity of them.”
Charles H. Parkhurst of Greenwich has an idea. “Since tolls are regressive I suggest that the state sales tax (which is also regressive) be lowered to a level that makes the combination roughly revenue neutral . ... With more and more electric cars on the roads who pay no gas taxes, it’s only fair that they also contribute to the maintenance and upgrade of the roads and bridges.”
Helen Robinson of New Haven agrees that “politicians have had a BIG say in the tolls debate, but not much has been heard recently from citizens . .... They pay tolls in NY and Mass, and they resent truckers and others who get a ride to cause wear and tear on our roads.” She would like to see a more extensive poll.
The last Quinnipiac Poll on tolls (one of 25 questions regarding the 2018 state elections) indicated 53 percent of Connecticut voters opposed tolls on state highways, with 40 percent in favor. Drilling down into the statistics, Democrats were more likely to support tolls than Republicans. I wonder if positions have shifted since the August, 2018 poll and the intense debate.
I know that my thinking has evolved in the past year with the realization that fixing our highways, bridges and rail systems will end up costing taxpayers one way or another. With borrowing, we pay 100 percent (even with low interest rates); with tolls at least outofstate drivers will pay an estimated 40 percent.
Fasano is adamant against tolls. I asked if there was any room for compromise, for example, on the Democrats’ idea the other day for trucksonly tolls. No, he replied without hesitation. Trucks one day, cars the next.
I credit Fasano and the Senate Republicans for doing the hard work and coming up with a reasonable response to Lamont’s CT2030 plan. They call it FASTR CT, for Fiscal Accountability & Sustainable Transportation Reform. But a criticism is that it takes money from the Rainy Day cushion to pay down pension liability.
So here we are. Lamont’s own Democratic party isn’t behind his plan for limited tolls, and Republicans certainly won’t go there. Democrats’ trial balloon of trucksonly tolls crashed, and Republicans don’t have a majority for their plan.
Up in Hartford they’re saying that tolls are dead for now, and possibly even for the next General Assembly session that opens in February. But that doesn’t mean taxpayers aren’t worrying about tolls — one way or the other. It doesn’t seem fair to leave everyone hanging.