Something very odd happened earlier this month when the Southington Town Council, weighing whether to pass a resolution opposing highway tolls, invited House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz to defend the plan.
Amid the usual flap about the likely costs — how many gantries, how much discount for Connecticut residents, who would control the money, how much money tolling would raise, yada yada — one councilman had the gall, the audacity, the sheer madness, to question the need for all this spending.
Whoa! We’ve all been arguing over how to pay for the tens of billions of dollars in highway and bridge work Connecticut simply must do over the next 30 years. Few have questioned the underlying projects.
“This fabricated crisis is all predicated on a $100 billion plan that hasn’t even been vetted,” said Republican Councilman Tony Lombardi, identified to me on the video by former Sen. Len Suzio of Meriden.
Aresimowicz, a Berlin Democrat whose conservative district includes part of Southington, works as a union official and football coach, and he’s more unflappable than just about anyone. “I strongly disagree with your characterization of a fabrication of crisis,” he said calmly.
The speaker is right on the fabricated part, but he agreed the list has not been vetted, much less debated.
Former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, at the start of his second term in early 2015, rolled out a “Let’s Go CT!” plan that detailed $100 billion in desperately overdue work. Rebuilding the mid-20th-century Waterbury mixmaster interchange and the Hartford viaduct, and widening Interstate 95 in Fairfield County, would account for at least $22 billion of the total.
Republicans in the General Assembly have settled on a figure in...
from News https://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Dan-Haar-What-s-missing-in-the-tolls-debate-A-13726758.php
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