Colin McNickle At Large

Can this Turnpike be saved?

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The state Senate Transportation Committee meets this week to, at long last, begin to address the mess the Legislature created for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission.

Turnpike operations have been financially crippled by nearly $12 billion in debt incurred to fulfill a legislative mandate – Act 44 of 2007 — that hundreds of millions of dollars in tolls be redirected annually to non-Turnpike projects, including mass transit.

That has led to constantly rising tolls and, predictably, a sharp drop in usage, especially among commercial users.

Two groups, including a truckers’ group, have challenged the transfers in a pending lawsuit, arguing they are in contravention of federal law that mandates tolls be used only for upkeep on the roads from which they are collected.

Indeed, on their face, the transfers appear to be patently illegal.

The Allegheny Institute detailed the Turnpike Commission’s dire straights in January (in Policy Brief Vol. 19, No. 2). And last week, state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said the Turnpike Commission is on the precipice of financial collapse because of the legislation. (Ironically, it’s a measure he voted for as a member of the Legislature, saying he believed it was only temporary).

As Frank Gamrat, this think tank’s executive director, noted as the new year bowed, “All this borrowing has severely eroded the (Turnpike Commission’s) financial position, leaving it (in fiscal 2018) with total assets of $8.9 billion and total liabilities of $14.5 billion for a total net position of negative $5.6 billion.”

And the auditor general also called into question the commission’s traffic projections regimen that, by the Allegheny Institute’s estimation (especially for new toll roads) has been found to not be based on reality.

So, can the Pennsylvania Turnpike be saved? That remains to be seen. But at least now attempting to fix this mess is on the front burner in the state Senate.

Better late than never — one could proffer. But this mess never should have been spawned. For public policy malpractice never ends well. And there are no more golden eggs available from the fully fleeced Turnpike goose that legislators thought once laid them.

Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).

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Colin McNickle
Colin McNickle

Colin received his B.G.S. from Ohio University. The 40-year journalism veteran joined the Institute in October 2016. That followed a 22-year career with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 18 as director of editorial pages for Trib Total Media. Prior that, Colin had a long and varied career in media — from radio, newspapers and magazines, to United Press International and The Associated Press.

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