Opinion: Florida's toll enterprise

The industry newsletter Toll Roads is at least upfront about the politics. "Tolling is a way to build and rebuild roads," the newsletter asserts, "without having to resort to taxes." Such simplicity. Hit the brakes, throw three quarters in the basket, and welcome to Florida's transportation future.

In two bills (HB 261 and SB 502) working their way through this year's Legislature and on the committee calendar today, lawmakers and Gov. Jeb Bush's Department of Transportation are pushing a new fiscal strategy with toll roads. The state has been criticized, and rightly so, for building money-losing toll roads that were based on inflated traffic projections (one consultant admitted to "just guessing"). So the DOT's answer is to eliminate the requirement that toll roads pay for themselves -- to, in other words, throw fiscal caution to the wind.

The bills, including the Senate version sponsored by Sen. Jim Sebesta, R-St. Petersburg, would create a "Turnpike Enterprise" that all but assures a more reckless approach to state road planning. Here are a few samples: DOT could build hotels and motels at turnpike interchanges, creating further development sprawl. DOT could invite contractors to bid on road projects in advance of getting pesky environmental permits. New toll roads could be built without the current requirement that the tolls begin paying 100 percent of the construction debt within 15 years.

Most notably, the "enterprise" would drop the pretense that tolls are a user fee. Toll advocates, and they include an entire national industry that has formed around the privatization of roads, argue that tolls are the most equitable way to finance new road construction in heavily populated areas. But their argument assumes that the motorist is paying a toll that finances the road being traveled. The fine print in Florida's Turnpike Enterprise is that it uses money collected from the main 265-mile turnpike, which was completed nearly four decades ago, to subsidize the rest of the roads and bridges it builds throughout the state. As Sen. Ron Klein of Delray Beach complained to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, "We shouldn't be building roads in North Florida on the backs of motorists in Central and South Florida."

The use of mainline turnpike proceeds to subsidize other Florida roads is not an invention of the "enterprise" bill, but the bill's passage will only make things worse -- and more costly. The toll approach itself assumes construction debt and bonds, which usually doubles the cost of any new road. And the cost of toll collection, despite touted improvements to technology that include high-speed scanners available only in select locations, still runs about 20 cents on the toll dollar. In other words, one of every $5 goes to pay the toll collector.

Drive the new Veterans Expressway and Suncoast Parkway in the Tampa Bay region and get a flavor for how the toll enterprise actually works. Between Interstate 275 on the south and State U.S. 98 on the north, the motorist is stopped at five different toll "plazas," for 75 cents, for 50 cents, for $1, for $1, for $1. The expressway that was built to rush traffic through a busy urban area has constructed its own financial red lights.

Florida already has an easily collected and efficient user fee for road construction, called the gas tax. So that lawmakers can substitute one t-word for another, motorists will pay a heavy price.

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