EDITORIAL Turnpike toll hikes are wrong for Pennsylvania

The interest tab on the state’s dozen-year shell game is coming due. It’s time to end the game and pay our bills honestly.

Ask not, fellow Pennsylvanians, for whom the toll rises; it rises for you.

With apologies to John Donne for the paraphrase above of his “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” the lifespan of continuously rising Pennsylvania Turnpike rates, now at 12 years straight, is starting to rival some estimates of Donne’s career as a top-shelf poet.

While Donne was pointing to the injustice of failing to recognize the mortality that binds all human beings, the 6% increase in turnpike tolls coming next year is a wrong against drivers who use that road and, potentially, Pennsylvania taxpayers in general.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission approved a toll hike earlier this month that will boost the most common toll for a passenger vehicle next year to $1.50 up from $1.40 for those with E-ZPass and to $2.50 from the current $2.30 for those paying cash. Truck drivers will see their most common E-ZPass toll rise to $17.30 up from $16.30. Tollby-plate payers will see their common rate rise to $7.70, up from $7.20. The 6% increases begin Jan. 5, the first Sunday of the year. It’s on the high end of annual increases that have varied between 4% and 6% since 2009.

The key factors driving the increases are:

— Act 44 of 2007, by which state lawmakers diverted $450 million per year from the turnpike to PennDOT for highway maintenance and mass transit.

— Act 89 of 2013, which gave Pennsylvania the highest gasoline tax in the nation, also devoted 100% of the turnpike’s diversion of funds to mass transit and capped it at $50 million per year beginning in 2023.

— Ongoing debt the turnpike is taking on to finance the $6.6 billion it has diverted to PennDOT under the two laws mentioned above.

— The $2.45 billion lawmakers dipped into the Motor License Fund — constitutionally limited to the construction, maintenance and safety of Pennsylvania roadways — to cover about two-thirds of the Pennsylvania State Police budget over the past six years.

For any Pennsylvanian who has noticed the toll increases and decided not to bear the increasing financial hardship of traveling the turnpike, there’s an aspect of this shell game that might yet affect you.

According to Mark Compton, the CEO of the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, his agency issued $800 million in municipal bonds to help make $900 million in payments to PennDOT during the two most recent fiscal years.

Putting that in perspective, Compton said that nearly half of toll collections for the coming fiscal year will go to debt service.

“Anticipated toll revenue is estimated at $1.4 billion for the fiscal year,” he said, “and our debt-service payments are roughly $700 million for the year.”

To say that this is unsustainable seems an understatement. One wonders if the debtburdened turnpike might soon need a bailout.

DePasquale’s office expressed worry about the debt in a news release with his latest audit.

“The audit notes that the Turnpike Commission will be at risk of defaulting on its debt payments if traffic and revenue projections are not met and steps are not taken to reduce the amount of money it must provide to PennDOT,” it said.

It seems unlikely that the state would let the commission default but if, as DePasquale worried, rising tolls depress traffic, raising them again to pay debt service would be impossible. The state would have to step in, meaning Pennsylvania taxpayers would bear the burden of the transportation fund shell game that put the turnpike in the debt-riddled mess it’s in.

While it’s past time for Gov. Tom Wolf and the General Assembly to address this problem, now would be far better than later.

Our leaders in Harrisburg need to find the spending cuts or extra revenue needed to cover the state police budget and let the turnpike commission devote its resources to maintaining its own 552 miles of roadway.

Tax collections on gasoline and diesel should be devoted, as the state constitution demands, to road construction and repairs. And toll collections on the turnpike should be used to keep that road in shape.

The interest tab on the state’s dozen-year shell game is coming due. It’s time to end the game and pay our bills honestly.