Melissa Bailey Photo
If Pat Dillon gets her way, all those drivers zipping through Connecticut will have to start ponying up.
Democrat Dillon (pictured at the Capitol), a New Haven state representative, has introduced a bill for the upcoming General Assembly session to bring back tolls on state highways. That way Connecticut could join states like Massachusetts and New York and New Jersey in collecting money from interstate drivers.
“We’re a toll-free zone. We’re paying tolls in Massachusetts, and we’re paying tolls in New York. That’s a lot of money. We need it for road upkeep. It’s very important for infrastructure,” Dillon said in an interview.
Her bill does not specify where the toll booths would be placed. She said she envisioned them cropping up at state borders on I‑95, I‑91, and the Wilbur Cross and Merritt Parkways.
She said she’d like to see the money collected go toward fixing roads as well as boosting mass transit, “given what’s going on with gridlock on our highways.”
Dillon said she does not have an estimate for how much money new tolls would bring the state. Nor does Alan Calandro, who heads the state’s Office of Fiscal Analysis.
In 2010 a Democrat from Fairfield County named Rudy Marconi ran for governor largely on the platform of bringing back tolls. At the time he estimated that the tolls could bring $1 billion a year to state coffers. (Click on the play arrow to watch him discuss the issue at the time.) A website called Toll Road News estimated in 2011 that placing toll plazas at eight key border points would bring the state up to $237 million in revenues with operating costs running at 5 to 10 percent. A 2009 Connecticut Transportation Strategy Board report estimated billions of dollars can come in. “Highway border tolls would raise significant revenue, but would do little to improve congestion in the corridor unless the revenues were invested in projects that provided such benefits,” the report warned. The details of a toll plan — how many tolls, where to use them, how much to charge, whether to use congestion pricing — would obviously determine the amount of revenue raised. And click here for links to findings of a 2009 state Office of Legislative Research report; it showed the state collected $72.3 million in the final full year of toll collection three decades ago.
Marconi never won his party’s nomination. He did plant a seed.
Connecticut abolished tolls on I‑95 in 1985, then on other highways soon after. Legislators did so after a tractor-trailer driver named Kluttz killed seven people in a crash at the Startford toll plaza after he fell asleep behind the wheel.
American toll stations have undergone dramatic changes since then. Rather than queue up at smog-producing booths, in many places the majority of drivers pass below an overhang that electronically charges their E‑Z pass accounts.
Meanwhile, Connecticut has plunged into a long-term fiscal morass. The gas tax has soared to the country’s fourth-highest level, in part because states offset their rates with money collected from tolls. Highways are as clogged as ever with drivers who feel trains or buses don’t offer suitable alternatives. And the advent of hybrid and electric cars promises to reduce the money the state will take in long-term from the gas tax, meaning it will need to find other ways to finance road repairs.
“We’ve got to start facing some realities in Connecticut,” said East Hartford state Sen. Gary LeBeau, who called himself an “enthusiastic supporter” of Dillon’s bill.
He noted that the bill faces long odds, though, because of continuing opposition from Fairfield County lawmakers. He suggested that Connecticut include a “frequent user” discounts part of a toll plan to help assuage them.
That won’t sway Fairfield state Sen. John McKinney. In an interview Wednesday, McKinney called tolls “another way to get more money from taxpayers” without legislators making choices about spending priorities. He argued that if legislators were that concerned about paying for road repairs, they wouldn’t have voted to raid the state’s transportation fund of “hundreds of millions of dollars” over the past decade to plug general operation budget gaps; and would not have directed $150 million in no-strings-attached federal transportation money to helping build the New Britain-Hartford busway. He said he also worried about the impact of border tolls on businesses in Greenwich that rely on Westchester County customers.
Several other Fairfield County lawmakers made their opposition plain at a forum the Connecticut Fund for the Environment hosted last year to discuss funding transportation infrastructure. “There is a visceral reaction from the public, not just from the voters, but also from businesses and chambers of commerce particularly in cities like Danbury where 40 percent of mall business comes from New York state,” state Sen. Toni Boucher, a Wilton Republican, remarked at the forum, according to Click here to read.
Some of her other proposals include:
• Allowing cities to charge more than $250 in fines for someone who wants to retrieve a confiscated dirt bike or all-terrain vehicle. She made the proposal in response to an outcry in November from local cops and aldermen for more help. (Read about that here; click on the play arrow to watch some of the testimony of young dirt bikers who disagree with the idea of a crackdown.)
• Fully funding the state’s payments in lieu of taxes program, which reimburses communities for property tax revenue lost on tax-exempt hospitals and universities, among other not-for-profits.
• Reimbursing cities for property taxes lost from “supportive housing” complexes, which enable addicts and people with mental disabilities to live in apartments, rather than hospitals or behind bars or shelters, and receive social-service support on-site.
“These are people who would still be in state hospitals if we still had them. It’s more humane to place people in the community. The problem is somebody’s paying a price for that because of our property tax system,” Dillon said.
“When we closed the state hospitals and we moved people out in the community, a lot of those folks have gone to housing which is zoned out of a lot of towns. I’m proud that we don’t do ‘not in my backyard’ [in New Haven]. We are very open. We have very good social policy. But we pay for that” through property taxes.
• Bonding $3.45 million for major structural repairs at the Shubert theater.
Christine Stuart contributed reporting.