How Connecticut's Effort To Make Trucks Pay Tolls Came To An End

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont has said he’s dropping a plan to toll trucks on highways. The plan continued to face obstacles in the legislature.

John Dankosky spoke with CT Mirror’s Mark Pazniokas for the podcast Steady Habits to unpack just what happened. 

John Dankosky: What's going on? Why did tolls die?

Mark Pazniokas, CT Mirror: It appears they are indeed dead. Although the governor, after meeting with legislative leaders — I think he read the tea leaves. He read the room, and said these guys are never going to vote for this, particularly in the Senate. So he called them out publicly, and he said, let's move on.

Just as he was about to sit down with the press, and say that, the Senate Democrats quickly sent out an e-mail saying, "No, no, no, no. Just give us five more days. We'll do it next week," which appeared to be their way of saying, "Hey, don't blame us, don't blame us, please don't blame us. We're not really the cause for why this has blown up."

So hold on. I want to understand something... This is over an attempt to toll tractor-trailers at 12 bridges around the state, raise about $187 million to go toward the Special Transportation Fund, help pay for transportation infrastructure improvements. It's been widely criticized by Republicans and a lot of Democrats, actually, in the state. They don't want to see any tolls, even tolls just on tractor-trailers — a lot of which are coming from out-of-state, but that's a whole different issue.

We get to this point where they're going to vote in this very bizarre way, at the same time, so that neither chamber takes the credit or the blame for passing or voting down tolls. Got it. That's where we left last week.

So now, it gets to the point where that vote wasn't taken. The governor says, "These guys are never, ever going to vote." And then the Senate says, "Give us five more days." Let me ask you a question, Paz. What the hell was going to happen in the next five days? Like, what were they going to use the five days for?

That's an excellent question. The House leadership and the governor concluded the Senate did not have sufficient votes to pass. There are 22 Democratic senators in a 36-seat chamber. They only needed 18, because you could break a tie with the lieutenant governor, who presumably would be with the governor.

But during this meeting, it became clear, at least to the governor — the governor's people and the House Democratic leadership — that the Senate didn't have the votes. And they reached the conclusion that nothing was going to change in five days.

And the governor just had had it. I mean, this is a fairly mild-mannered gentleman. And he just said he's lost his patience: "Let's move on to another way to finance transportation."

How is it possible that the Senate didn't get the votes necessary to do this in time to actually get to a vote? I mean, what happened there?

Well, OK, that's where this gets potentially into a big-picture story about the evolution of the modern legislature, particularly the Connecticut General Assembly. There is this sense that in this day and age, that every senator is basically a free agent, that there's not a lot of party discipline.

These folks are elected using public financing. In the old days, you would rely on your party leaders to help raise you money. And in fact, most of the money was raised in Hartford from lobbyists and other folks who have business at the General Assembly. That's no longer the case. It's also, you know, it's — we are in the age of Facebook, Twitter, whatnot — these folks all have their own independent channels of communicating with their constituents. And it all adds to this sense of: "No, we're gonna go our own way."

I'm not going to ask you to necessarily make any sort of a comment on that, seeing as how you have to cover these people every day. But as you say it that way, I'm thinking, as a voter in Connecticut, well, isn't that exactly what we're supposed to have?

I mean, each one of these people is supposed to represent their their Senate district, whether they're a Democrat or a Republican, it'd be nice if they voted their conscience, if something really bothered them. It'd be nice if they were accountable to the people who voted them in, as opposed to whoever the the Senate leadership is. On the Democratic side, it seems like that's an evolution that a lot of people can get behind — maybe not the Democratic Party — but a lot of people can get behind.

Yes and no. So when we have those kind of reforms, or that kind of evolution, on their face, it's like, "Hey, great, you're only beholden to your own people." But what you lose in that, sometimes, is the willingness to take a risk for the greater good.

Now, I'm not going to pronounce judgment on whether or not truck tolls would have been for the greater good. But there are times when there are votes that are tough to take, and people would prefer not to take them. And that's not really a great development.

You know, you can look at how we elect people. Until 1970 in Connecticut, there were no primaries. The parties played a bigger role, and you had more party discipline. You could say, "Well, it's great. Democracy is great." And then the first time they did that, in a presidential election, to a great degree, you ended up with a candidate for the Democrats who only won one of 50 states.

So, I mean, there is this sweet spot, right, between party leadership trying to come up with a rational approach to public policy, or to the nominations of candidates, versus shutting out the public. And, you know, that's an imperfect thing. Democracy is a messy thing.

OK, so if we set aside the larger issues of democracy that we've been grappling with at the state Capitol, what happens next with tolls, and with the funding that the governor was seeking for transportation?

There's going to be, I think, a cooling-off period. The question is how long.

So the message that the governor gave to these folks is: "Look, I'm still not going to go crazy on borrowing." The governor has talked about a debt diet. And he said, "I'm going to have to go more into general obligation borrowing that would usually be used for other things" — legislative pet projects, schools, sewers, all kinds of things. And the message right now is: "This is going to come out of your hide, not mine." In other words, "We're not going to borrow more money overall, but more of it is going to go for transportation."

And that'll be a short-term thing, because the idea of saying, "We're just going to take what we borrow every year, and we're just going to use it for transportation" — that's what one of the Republicans plans were. They called it "prioritize progress." The problem with that, from a point of view of actually having enough money to do what you need to do in transportation, is that requires discipline. Year after year after year, "This is how we're going to spend our money."

And yes, the second impact is there won't be money for Little League fields. There won't be money for all kinds of things. Now, some people would argue, "Well, Little League fields should be the local town, or mom and dad raising money." But, you know, it's part of the lubrication that makes the gears go around at the Capitol, the idea you have money available to do these projects.

Interestingly, that's one of the governor's problems. He had not agreed to a lot of this stuff. He did not have a lot of goodwill built up with legislators. His reasonable strategic plan was, "Well, I'm going to hold that back, and I'll have leverage over them, and maybe we can get to an accommodation on tolls." Well, that fell apart.

So then, I guess, the last important thing here is: If the governor pulls the plug on tolls because he thinks that they're not going to have the votes in the Senate, and the Senate kind of comes back and says, "No, no, no, we can do it. We can take a vote in five days" — is there any movement at all right now, as we talk, at the Capitol to get tolls back on the table?

And if tolls were to get back on the table, given that Ned Lamont started during the campaign on truck tolls, moved to truck and car tolls, moved back to truck tolls, and now saw that he can't get any sort of votes, and is just like, "Oh, to heck with this." I can't imagine the governor goes back and go, "OK, let's take another swing at tolls."

No. And if you are a Senate Democrat, and you weren't crazy about this — the political insiders who really follow this stuff are going to blame them for why this didn't go forward. But if you're just generally following it, really, are you going to remember that?

But if they ultimately do tolls, people will be aware, because people are going to run against you, saying, "This guy voted for truck tolls." And the pressure is off, at least for the moment. Now: Theoretically, anything's possible. The governor could come back and say, "You know what? We need to do a huge gas tax increase," or, "We need to bump the sales tax by a point, and dedicate a big chunk of it to transportation."

He could say that. He's not saying that, but he could say that.

No. Or, God forbid, a bridge falls down. You know, these are the unknowns. These are the things that could make them quickly come back and say, "You know what? That idea wasn't so crazy." But right now, the political will has evaporated, and the governor made quite clear he's ready to move on. So we'll see where that goes.

And I would just say, for the Democratic Party, if anybody's going to remember anything out of this, they will probably remember people holding "no tolls" banners outside the Capitol, and signs in people's yards, and the fact that there was quite some vocal opposition — even if only a relatively small number of people. Those people, mostly on the Republican side, are going to claim this as a gigantic win, I can only imagine. And for the Democrats who control the legislature, that's got to be terrible.

It is a win for the Republicans, clearly. Now, the question is, can they expand this victory to say, "Will you look at these guys? They just kind of floundered around for a year, for 13 months, trying to figure out how to fund a transportation program."

You know, that gets a little abstract. Abstractions generally don't move voters. But if it taps into this larger sense that these guys at the Capitol don't know what they're doing, then it could resonate, then it could get traction — and then it might move votes.

But this is the fun part of the political game about what is going to catch fire, and what is not.

Thank you once again, Paz, for talking about tolls. And I hope we never have to do it again.

The same here.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. Keep up with Steady Habits here.