Pike paid consultants to bolster toll removal
Almost $591,000 spent on hotly disputed plan
The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority paid a cadre of consultants nearly $591,000 to try to bolster the Romney administration's plan to eliminate the western tolls, an initiative that was declared all but dead yesterday by one of its champions on the Turnpike board.
In November and December, the agency paid seven consultants, including four law firms, to review legal, environmental, labor, and financial issues associated with the complex proposal to take down the tolls from Weston to Springfield.
The plan was first proposed by Governor Mitt Romney just three weeks before Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey's Election Day showdown with Democrat Deval Patrick.
The board will not make a final decision until Patrick administration officials meet with Turnpike Authority chairman John Cogliano later this week, according to authority officials, but several board members acknowledged yesterday that the plan appears to be doomed.
Michael Widmer -- president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, who opposed the plan from the start -- said the expensive consultant tab "only rubs salt in the wounds."
"That's money that is being eaten by tollpayers," said Widmer, who sits on a state commission that is preparing a comprehensive evaluation of transportation finances.
When announced in October, the toll-removal proposal was decried by Democrats as a political ploy to buoy Healey's foundering candidacy. The proposal also ran into opposition from the state inspector general, who said there might be legal and financial obstacles to eliminating the tolls and transferring the western turnpike to the state Highway Department.
But over the next two months, the Turnpike Authority hired a high-powered group of consultants to analyze the plan. According to Turnpike spokesman Jon Carlisle, the board paid four law firms: $145,744 to Mintz Levin; $156,004 to Choate Hall & Stewart; $106,000 to WilmerHale; and $63,124 to Foley Hoag. Public Resources Advisory Group, a New York-based financial and investment advisory firm, was paid $56,417 and
The Turnpike Authority also paid Eric Kriss, a former Romney administration official, $28,012 to study the agency's finances. He appeared before the board to recommend abolishing the tolls on Oct. 18, the day Romney and Healey unveiled the proposal and board members took initial steps to implement it. The board has twice delayed a final vote.
The authority would not describe the work the firms performed or provide the reports they prepared, saying they are not yet public records.
Jack McCarthy, a senior assistant inspector general who has reviewed the reports, said the firms looked at a variety of complex legal, financial, and environmental factors.
For example, Mintz Levin was asked to analyze whether the authority had the legal power to take down the tolls, Choate Hall assessed whether the leases on the turnpike service plazas could be sold to help pay off the $199 million in debt on the western portion of the highway, and the Public Resources Advisory Group studied other ways to retire the debt and make up for lost toll revenue.
Only the Public Resources Advisory Group was selected in a competitive bidding process. The four law firms were paid under existing contracts with the Turnpike Authority, which keeps them on retainer, Carlisle said.
Even though the Turnpike has its own, four-person legal department, officials hired the outside law firms because they "wanted a fresh set of eyes to look at it," Carlisle said. "Whenever you're looking at a major policy issue I think there is wide consensus that outside counsel are helpful."
Yesterday, Inspector General Gregory Sullivan called the toll-removal proposal "an expensive and cynical political stunt."
Board member Mary Connaughton, a Romney appointee who supports removing the tolls, said she found it "hard to believe" that the Turnpike spent so much money on consultants.
"I would want to go through those issues with a fine-tooth comb to make sure those are appropriate billings," she said. "I'm not convinced that is appropriate billing for the amount of service we got."
Romney and Healey originally pitched the idea as a way to ease the burden on suburban commuters and cut waste in government by putting this portion of the Turnpike under the jurisdiction of the Highway Department.
"Governor Romney believes the tolls should come down," Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney's spokesman, said yesterday.
"If we use as an excuse to keep the tolls up that we need the revenue to pay for our inefficient transportation bureaucracy, then the tolls will never come down, and Massachusetts motorists will end up losing," he said.
But Connaughton and board vice chairman John Moscardelli, who was appointed by Acting Governor Jane Swift, both said the plan appears to be doomed, unless Patrick changes his mind.
"I tend to think it's dead," said Moscardelli. "I don't think it was a particularly prudent idea in the first place."
Several actions taken by the Turnpike Authority board in December to advance the issue, including hiring bond counsel and traffic consultants and developing a request for proposals to lease the turnpike's service plazas, are "more or less in a holding pattern" until discussions take place later this week among Transportation Secretary Bernard Cohen, Administration and Finance Secretary Leslie Kirwan, and Cogliano, according to a Turnpike official.
Patrick spokesman Kyle Sullivan called the expense "a classic example of what happens when you separate authority from responsibility."
"It wastes not only the public's money, but the public's trust," he said.
Drivers who pay the western tolls have long sought their elimination. In 1952, when the authority was created, lawmakers said they would end the toll when the original bonds were paid off. That happened in 1983, but the tolls remained.
State Representative Joseph Wagner, chairman of the House Transportation Committee and an outspoken opponent of removing the tolls, called the consultants' bill "a large sum of money for tollpayers to have to pay to reach a conclusion that was fairly obvious coming in.
"I really believe the proposal was offered up in order to aid Kerry Healey in her run for governor," Wagner said.
