{image1}MILWAUKEE -- The recent Transportation Finance (read: tolls) Summit proved that no one in Wisconsin politics has more tenacity than Kevin Soucie. He is the soft-spoken and cerebral former state legislator who has single-handedly legitimized the notion of toll roads in Wisconsin public policy discussions.
Soucie was blown out of the water a year ago when he was just a guy with a Power Point presentation, campaigning for tolls as the way to pay for the Marquette Interchange reconstruction.
Tolls are anathema in Wisconsin. Too much like what we hate about Illinois. Too regressive. Just another tax. No way, said Gov. Jim Doyle, then-Mayor John Norquist and a clutch of editorial writers and columnists. While it wasn't Soucie's goal, it looked like another way to stick it to Milwaukee while new roads and bridges were being built up and down the state without a tollbooth in sight.
But Soucie has been patient and persuasive. He was able to bring together leading business groups like the Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce, the Wisconsin Transportation Development Association (a/k/a The Roadbuilders) and many others to hear all-day presentations from U.S. and Canadian experts about the New Holy Grail of Tolls, and how they can save Wisconsin's deficit-ridden state transportation fund.
Even Republicans, who have reduced the GOP to a one-issue party -- The No New Tax Party -- should be willing to have an open mind on tolls, as Republican state Rep. Jeff Stone put it to the summit in his closing remarks. Stone, now on the Legislature's budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, had been chairman last year of the Assembly Transportation Committee, so his opinion counts.
So what's going on?
For one thing, modern technology has made toll collection a lot less cumbersome. Forget those long lines at toll booths just over the border in Illinois (where tolls have led some of us to spell Illinois "Ill-annoy," quipped Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance president Todd Berry). Forget not having the right change, or squeezing yourself between the booth and your fender on hot summer pavement to find the quarter you dropped.
Now toll collection can be by electronic sensor and bar-coded bumper sticker and automatic withdrawal from your toll account while you buzz down the freeway. Painless. Invisible. It's like not paying at all!
And tolls come in a whole new variety.
There are old-fashioned flat tolls. Or toll system operators and computers can vary the amount of the toll during rush hours, or as traffic builds up or lessens in so-called "hot lanes," and motorists can choose whether its worth it to hop on and pay.
And always without stopping at a toll booth.
These modern variations, some privately financed business ventures or partnerships with government, are up and operating in Canada and California and are on the drawing board elsewhere. Texas, where they are always thinking big, has planned a state network of road, rail and utility corridors more than 1,000 feet wide, with toll lanes as a major component.
What keeps the issue alive in Wisconsin is the state transportation fund's projected deficit of more than $5 billion, even though Wisconsin's traditional highway revenue source -- the gas tax -- is the second-highest in the nation at 29.1 cents per gallon. Somehow we pay a higher state gas tax than just about anyone else in America, and it's still not enough.
Former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson and the Legislature even arranged in 1985 for the tax to go up every year about a half-cent, making the tax increase automatic and free of much political fallout -- and that's not enough, either.
But no state politician now dares suggest a new bump in the tax, because the state would need to hike it seven or eight cents to fund most of Wisconsin's planned -- but unfunded -- highway expansions.
What to do, what to do? Politicians aren't embracing the alternatives.
One is cutting back on road-building, but that would be too horrifying to the road builders. They and their allies in state government, especially Republican legislators, are somewhat like the military-industrial complex and their allies in Congress who never suggest cutting defense spending.
Same for the road-building alliance. Wiping projects off the list is not the way they do business.
Another option is borrowing the money. That's the one favored by Tom Walker, the longtime Wisconsin road-building guru, but it's a credit card approach that requires state income taxes to pay the bills. That's the same big-spending mentality that got the state into its multi-billion-dollar deficit situation last year.
While road-builders don't have to run for office, elected officials do -- and saying you're the deficit-candidate is a pure gift to your opponent and opposition TV ads.
So tolls, if they are defined as a "user fee," and if they are packaged in the trendy political lingo of "choices," and above all, IF THEY'RE NOT CALLED A TAX, now have been put on the table officially by local and state business leaders.
Doyle sent Frank Busalacchi, the state transportation secretary and highway expansion advocate, to the Soucie's summit, where in the mid-afternoon, after hours of pro-toll rhetoric, Busalacchi delivered a terse, unambiguous "no" to tolls in Wisconsin.
He said it more than once, in case anyone missed it the first time, too.
"Tolls are not up for consideration as an option by the governor," Busalacchi said, backing up Doyle's previous and consistent rejection of the idea. "Tolls are just another form of taxes."
Busalacchi did something else, too.
He said the Doyle administration would not bring forward segments of the 270-mile southeast Wisconsin freeway expansion proposal -- the biggest threat to the state's deficit-laden transportation fund -- without having the funding in place.
Busalacchi's pledge was a not-too-subtle dig at former GOP governors Thompson and Scott McCallum. They kept floating out unfunded Marquette Interchange plans as expensive as $1.4 billion, and those huge numbers gave opponents of expanding the interchange a lot of ammunition.
Doyle eventually pared back some of the boundaries of the Marquette reconstruction plan, and the cost dropped to $810 million. That allowed him to look more fiscally responsible than his Republican predecessors, even though his plan was still $350 million more than a rebuilding plan originally laid out by the state DOT and pushed unsuccessfully by then-Mayor Norquist.
There remains a shortfall of $5.5 billion for the rest of the freeway expansion plan in southeast Wisconsin, and that continues to put Republican expansion backers in a fiscal and political jam. It also gives expansion opponents a very strong card to play, especially when state and local governments are now routinely cutting staffs and reducing spending.
Busalacchi's pledge to move segments forward only when the financing is locked down gives the opponents more time to organize. Delay also works in the opponents' favor, because inflation will run up the cost of a project that is already stalled by a funding shortage. So don't look for the bulldozers to be digging new lanes anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Republicans like Stone are caught in a tremendous contradiction. They want to cut taxes, but they want to build more roads. And if tolls are the answer, they need to parse and contort the language to define a toll as not being a tax to keep within their ideological principles.
It's like telling all your friends that you're the biggest champion of the Atkins diet -- but trying to figure out a way to say that donuts aren't really carbs.
So Republicans may be cozying up to tolls. Stone -- their recognized Assembly transportation expert -- says he has an open mind.
That may leave Doyle -- a Democrat -- alone atop the No New Tax Mountain.
And re-elected in a cakewalk if the Republicans become the Toll Party.
James Rowen is a Milwaukee writer and consultant.
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