From the Indianapolis Star:
Gov. Mitch Daniels urged lawmakers Thursday not to reduce Indiana's federal highway funding because the state leased its toll road to a foreign consortium in 2006.
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The Senate-passed version of a highway bill that Congress is trying to complete in the next few weeks would remove privatized highways from the calculation used to distribute federal highway funds to states.
That could reduce Indiana's funding by $42 million, about 4.5 percent, per year.
"This is a state that gets screwed every year anyway" on federal highway funding. "Now they'd reduce it further," Daniels told reporters.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., argues that Indiana is fleecing federal taxpayers because it got $3.8 billion to lease the toll road for 75 years, yet it still receives federal funds to help maintain those 157 miles of highway that the private consortium must now maintain through the tolls collected.
"I don't believe that states should be allowed to use their existing publicly funded highways as a virtual ATM, leaving the rest of this country's drivers to foot the bill," Bingaman wrote in an opinion piece published by The Washington Post in May.
Daniels said having a private entity collect tolls and maintain the road is not different from what the state was doing when it operated the road while still receiving federal highway dollars for it.
"Why were they sending it all those other years?" Daniels, a Republican, said about Bingaman's logic. "Fifty years and nobody complained."
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See the full article here:
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012206010342
Some recent posts on the Toll Road Lease can be found here:
http://indianapropertytaxreporter.blogspot.com/2012/06/gov-daniels-touts-success-of-toll-road.html
http://indianapropertytaxreporter.blogspot.com/2012/05/more-on-toll-road-lease-continues-to.html
http://indianapropertytaxreporter.blogspot.com/2012/05/indiana-toll-road-lease-still.html
