False Promises Aren’t the Path to Economic Recovery

Over the last few weeks Connecticut residents again heard majority party legislators talk about the need to improve our state's infrastructure, ease frustrating highway congestion, reduce rail commute times, and enhance our bus transit network. The ultimate goal, we were told, is economic growth. Yet when conversation about transportation reached its fever pitch last week, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle issued a tolling plan. Not a transportation plan, but a "trucks-only" tolling plan that included no actual transportation improvements—only a directive to prioritize enhancement projects at tolled bridges as well as projects designed stop toll diversions. Notably absent was any apparent benefit to people craving an economic recovery—job creators and overtaxed residents who correctly viewed the tolling plan as a revenue grab. As you may have seen on television, that tolling plan landed with a thud. Its proponents hoped to vote on it in a special session just before the start of the 2020 regular legislative session. That roadmap, however, dissolved just before their hastily-called public hearing when Democrat leaders learned they didn't have the votes to get the tolling plan onto the governor's desk. Public outcry drove their decision to call off the special session. What concerned many was a loophole that would, despite "trucks-only" promises, allow for widespread tolling in two years. The eventual expansion of tolls to all vehicles is a point my Republican colleagues and I have joined residents in predicting, and even the senate's Democrat president, Martin Looney, conceded to reporters that future legislatures could noodle with the trucks-only language. Senator Looney, though, told the news media he didn't think that would happen because there's no appetite among Democrats to cast that wider tolling net. Most taxpayers, however, know that appetites change—particularly in a legislature populated with influential progressives who liked Gov. Lamont's 50-gantry plan that tolled everyone. For me, the economic argument Democrats make about tolls rings hollow because they've spent years pursuing anti-business legislation that's positioned our state among the most difficult places in the nation to run a company. The last legislative session erected some of the biggest hurdles for the business community I've seen in my time serving you in Hartford. Improving our economy should instead begin with reducing taxes and easing regulations, not with tolls and more false promises about getting commuters to their desks quicker.