Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
JEAN HELLERUsing tolls from one road to pay for others will expand as a new state law redirects funds from highways that reap windfalls.
ST. PETERSBURG - The tolls were exorbitant when the Gandy Bridge opened in 1924, the first cross-bay link between St. Petersburg and Tampa.
It cost 75 cents per car, 10 cents per passenger, 20 cents per cow.
With World War II in full swing, President Roosevelt decided cars pausing at the Gandy's tollbooths hindered the war effort. He freed the Gandy of tolls, one of the few cases anyone can recall of a toll being lifted in the Tampa Bay area.
Even after a road or bridge is paid for, tolls rarely end.
Many motorists assume their tolls pay for the road or bridge they are using or for its upkeep. But increasingly, money collected on one road pays for construction of another.
It is a system that has been used for years by Florida's Turnpike to pay for new roads. Turnpike tolls from elsewhere helped pay for the Veterans Expressway, the Suncoast Parkway and the Polk Parkway.
Now the concept is spreading.
State officials plan to use a new law to siphon off excess tolls from the Sunshine Skyway, one of the state's healthiest roads financially, to pay for new road projects. They also plan to tap money generated by the Pinellas Bayway and the Beeline East Expressway in Orange County.
Unlike the rules for spending Turnpike tolls, the new law requires toll money from the Skyway and the other two roads to remain in the road districts where the money is collected.
The Skyway and Bayway will pay for improvements to U.S. 19 between Whitney Road and State Road 60 in Pinellas County, a connector expressway between Interstate 4 and the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway near the Port of Tampa and road improvements in Manatee County.
Margaret Covello, who commutes on the Sunshine Skyway bridge to her job with the Tampa Electric Co. in Ruskin, said she assumed the bridge sucked up all of its own tolls.
"I would hope the tolls I pay go back into the Skyway, because it needs a lot of upkeep," Covello said.
But Susan Schrier, a nursing home administrator in St. Petersburg who commutes over the Skyway from Bradenton, said using toll money to pay for other projects makes sense.
"There are so many places where older roads are overcrowded, areas that would benefit tremendously from an alternative route, that this isn't a bad idea at all," Schrier said. "At least it's road money going for roads."
But Covello doesn't like it.
"All that does is invite more growth, and this area doesn't need more growth," she said. "Look at what's happened in Hillsborough with the Veterans Expressway. It was an open invitation to developers, and they're all over the place."
State Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Jim Sebesta, R-St. Petersburg, defends using excess toll money to pay for other roads.
"We kick around ideas all the time about how to increase funding for transportation," he said. "We knew there were excess tolls, and the question became what you do with them. We decided to try to address some of the worst transportation headaches in Pinellas and Hillsborough, and I think that's legitimate."
For the time being, the Skyway, Bayway and Beeline will be the only three roads contributing tolls to other nonturnpike projects.
"Those are the only three that had a sufficient revenue source over and above their own operating and maintenance costs," Sebesta said.
The Turnpike has been diverting excess tolls to new roads since its initial 30-year bond issue was paid off in 1988.
"The Legislature debated a lot of different scenarios, including elimination of the tolls, but in the end decided to use the excess to back the bonds that would fund roads that were needed but couldn't otherwise be funded," said Kim Poulton, communications director for the Turnpike Enterprise.
In addition to the $507-million Suncoast Parkway, the $342-million Veterans Expressway and the $488-million Polk Parkway, turnpike funds also paid for the Seminole Expressway in Sanford and parts of the Greeneway and Beeline highways outside Orlando.
The turnpike system collected $420-million, mostly tolls, in fiscal year 2002, Poulton said. About 35 percent, or $142.6-million, helped pay down debt that totaled $1.3-billion. Much of the rest went for new road work.
There are no more projects scheduled to be built with turnpike money in this region.
"We did the Veterans and the Suncoast over there," Poulton said. "I think we've done pretty well by you."