Attempting to Buy Off Voters In Hackensack

Gov. Jon Corzine was in Hackensack, New Jersey last night to try and convince some 800 people that his plan to more than double tolls in the state was a good idea. Mrs. Lawhawk pointed out that it was most curious that an annoucement yesterday that the State Department of Transportation would begin studying widening Route 17 between Hasbrook Heights and Paramus in 2009. No coincidence there. Of course, widening that stretch of road has been discussed and debated for years and had the Transportation Trust Fund been fully funded in the past, it could have been fixed for far less than the $350 million projected.

It's a bottleneck on the heavily travelled road through the heart of Bergen County and the traffic is absolutely awful during bad weather and the holiday season as the road alternates between two and three lanes before and after that stretch.

Work is currently being done to replace the Essex Street interchange, and while the road will be widened to three lanes at that point, the bottleneck will occur just to the North.

The widening project is expected to cost more than $350 million, though I think the costs will be significantly higher because the study is only the first step. There is the need to buy land from those adjacent to the highway for easements and to realign the road and there are few places in the country where land is more expensive than in Bergen County.

The actual expense of widening the road will include rebuilding bridges and overpasses as well.

Charles Stiles thinks this is the first of the pork projects to help get the toll hike approved. He's right, but New Jersey residents will take this kind of pork since it will help them in their daily lives. Politicians are more likley to be reluctant to stand in the way of the plan because it plays very well with unions whose construction jobs are likely to see continued stability with new projects in the works or underway:

That strategy cuts to the concrete heart of his complicated toll hike scheme. Accept my plan, Corzine is telling lawmakers, and you will be blessed with highway largesse in your districts. Your constituents will see rush-hour parking lots transformed into stress-free macadam carpets. Voters will thank you for having the foresight and the courage to support the plan. Those self-congratulatory signs with shovels saying "this work is paid by your tax dollars" (and toll hikes) will line the highways.

Corzine is correct that the state needs to improve its funding of transportation and to relieve the state's crushing debt load, but the toll plan siphons off most of the toll hikes to the general fund and for items other than transportation. That's a recipe for continued fiscal irresponsibility.

Creating a new public benefits corporation will not solve the problem either, since the Turnpike Authority is supposed to do the same job - and if that organization is rife with bureaucratic inefficiencies, how is a new layer of bureaucracy supposed to fix things? It can't; and it wont.

He thinks bondholders will go for his plan, but it ignores the fact that a new public benefits corporation will face higher costs until it has a record under its belt.

The Times points out that the Turnpike Authority has been reluctant to raise tolls in the past, as if that is a bad thing in and of itself. The purpose of the tolls was to pay for capital construction costs over time. By changing the purpose of the tolls, Corzine is turning them from a user fee into a burdensome tax.