The Toll Draft-Bill Fine Print

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” is not a sentiment often heard in Connecticut’s General Assembly. Nor is it often heard in the state’s media, besieged relentlessly with press releases issued by forked-tongued legislators.

The tolling draft-bill that may soon be approved by the General Assembly on a party line vote is the usual “rush job,” even though Democrats certain to vote in favor of the bill knew it was coming down the pike shortly after Ned Lamont had been elected Governor in January, 2019, a year ago.

The latest draft omits language in other versions that assigned the authority to raise toll rates to the legislature, where it belongs, and instead confers the authority to raise taxes – or “user fees” as artful Democrats would prefer -- to an unelected, and therefore irreproachable, newly formed Transportation Policy Council. This abdication of responsibility relives legislators of their constitutionally assigned “getting and spending” powers.

“I find it unacceptable,” Republican Representative Gail Lavielle commented, “because the legislature has to approve everything else when you collect money. Another thing I find that people in the public won’t notice is that until 2030, any expansion of the tolls would have to be approved by three-fifths of the legislature. But after 2030 all bets are off. If that is indeed the case, then they should know this.”

The quasi-legislative Transportation Policy Council, the Yankee Institute tells us, “will be comprised of 13 appointees made by legislative leaders and the governor. It will include commissioners of the Department of Economic and Community Development, the Department of Housing and the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection or their appointees, the state treasurer or his appointee and the secretary of the Office of Policy and Management or her appointee. One of the governor’s appointees must represent labor unions.” As anticipated, the council will be top-heavy with members at the beck and call of legislators who have surrendered their constitutional obligations to an unelected tax-writing body, a shield for anxious politicians on election days.

The bill as written, Republican Senator Len Fasano has pointed out, contains a massive loophole. The “guarantee” in the bill that only truck toll revenue will be used to pay bond holders may easily be voided by paying off the bond early and rewriting the covenant to include cars as well as trucks, an eventuality that would hardly disappoint bond financiers since, with the addition of cars, financing will be more secure. Lamont, Fasano points out, recently deployed a similar strategy to satisfy teacher pension bond-holders.

The draft-bill also contains costly project labor agreements in which the state, succumbing to pressure from labor unions, agrees to provide to non-union construction workers the same salary and benefits afforded to union workers. Trade union workers in Connecticut, however, may not understand that it is possible to reduce costs, even under these restrictions, by parceling out work to unionized out-of-state construction firms in which the cost of labor is less.

Because the bill is a “working draft” it is subject to revision. None of the provisions in the draft legislation is written in stone. All of the tax-grabbing provisions are therefore subject to change, and the agents of future changes will not be those averse to tolls, but rather the authors of the draft amendment; that is to say, Democrat legislators whose numbers in the General Assembly  allow them to press forward future legislation by force majeure.

Associated costs and revenue estimates are not offered in the draft-bill, though Democrat leaders have speculated they expect a harvest of toll revenue in the range of $150-$175 million per year from a big-trucks-only plan.

The operative word here is “speculate.” The General Assembly has not had an enviable record in estimating revenue receipts or costs, one among many deficiencies that have pushed the state into a deficit black hole. According to reliable figures, Connecticut’s total state and local unfunded pension and other post-employment benefits (OPEB) liability, is somewhere in the vicinity of $124.9 billion.”

According to the non-partisan Yankee Institute, the architects of the draft legislation have yet to release “the costs for construction of the gantries. Contracts with toll operators and administrative costs have yet to be released for this plan and are based on estimates for Lamont’s previous CT2030 plan.”

Autocratic, big spending legislators generally do not fret over costs before they drive tax taps into the wallets of their victims. Seasoned leaders of the General Assembly's Democrat caucus know that they must get the cow in the barn before they milk it dry.

Revenue from the big-truck-only tolls, we are told, will be deposited in the Transportation Fund and used, it has been assumed by credulous reporters and the general public, ONLY for transportation improvements. But past practice is instructive. The Transportation Fund has long been outrigged with a false bottom; revenue destined for the fund has been intercepted and diverted into the General Fund, there to be parceled out to friends of the ruling majority, Democrats who have commanded the General Assembly roost, with some minor lapses, for the past few decades.