Desperate politics
It made for great political theater a decade ago: Governor Bill Weld taking a jackhammer to the toll booth in West Newton in the midst of his race for the US Senate against John Kerry. Of course it had nothing to do with politics, he dead-panned at the time. Whatever his sins, Weld was always a funny guy.
Now Kerry Healey, with her lieutenant governor, Mitt Romney, at her side, is playing the same card, minus Weld's roguish charm. But rather than level a few toll booths, Healey wants to blow up the entire Massachusetts Turnpike system. Desperate times call for desperate measures. See the poll numbers with less than three weeks to go to understand why.
Healey's cynical October surprise brings public funding for political campaigns to a whole new level -- taking a couple hundred million in toll money and using it to fuel her gutter campaign. Maybe her husband, Sean Healey, will sell some more options in his money machine in Prides Crossing and use it to maintain the turnpike when those tolls are gone. Don't hold your breath.
Who doesn't hate tolls? Healey wants to end the tolls from West Stockbridge to Boston. She wants to cut the state income tax. She wants to suspend the gas tax in the summer. And she wants to do it by striking the budget line marked fraud, waste, and abuse. Healey/Romney spent the first two years raising any fee they could find; now, three weeks before the election, they want to eliminate turnpike tolls. They want to end tolls, and raise MBTA fares. We need to get people out of their cars and onto trains and buses, not the opposite.
The tolls gambit is another budget shell game. Administration numbers man Eric Kriss, who provided the analytical cover for this transparent stunt, acknowledges in his report that the move ``shifts the burden" for deficits, maintenance, and financing ``from tollpayers to all taxpayers." But it gets worse. ``This analysis does not address the significant deferred maintenance in transportation infrastructure statewide," he writes. ``Capital investment of $80 million to $100 million annually is needed to maintain the existing [turnpike] infrastructure."
The turnpike authority is an easy, well-stuffed pig to skewer. But what Massachusetts needs is a rational approach to its transportation requirements for the next two decades, not one tailored to the current election cycle. That is exactly what the state's Transportation Finance Commission has been examining, and it is expected to come out with recommendations next month completely opposite where Healey wants to take us. The commission wants to consider expanded tolls and maintain turnpike tolls after 2017, when they are due to expire. Her approach also puts her at odds with most other states, which are expanding toll roads, not abandoning them.
Tolls are unfair, and higher tolls as currently scheduled are even more unfair because they target the same drivers day after day while giving others a free ride. Kriss's analysis draws a road map for the answer, but he doesn't dare go there. Kriss's major objection to the tolls is the inefficiency of collecting them, saying they cost nearly 30 cents on every dollar to collect. By comparison a gas tax costs only one-tenth of one cent to collect. Consider: a 10-cent increase in the gas tax would raise $300 million annually, enough to abolish the tolls and put a real dent in the state's transportation needs. Phase it in over several years and no one would even notice it.
But you will not see Healey or her posse going anywhere near a gas tax. That is because she has her eye on the only prize that matters, getting elected. Kerry Healey take note: Bill Weld took down his toll booth, and lost the election. History is about to repeat itself.
You can reach Steve Bailey at bailey@globe.com or 617-929-2902. 