Bridge Tolls
Advocacy Project

East River Toll Eyed In Albany in Lieu of Tax

This article appeared on the front page of the April 9, 2003 New York Sun.

By WILLIAM F. HAMMOND JR.
Staff Reporter of the Sun

ALBANY The Pataki administration is now considering tolls on the East River bridges as a partial solution to New York City's budget deficit, according to a City Council official who met with the governor's aides yesterday.

In a meeting with City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, the Pataki aides brought up putting tolls on bridges as an alternative to the commuter tax that city officials are seeking, according to one of Mr. Miller's press aides, Fred Baldassaro.

They were alluding to Mayor Bloomberg's proposal for charging drivers to cross the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro bridges as a way of raising about $100 million a year.

Supporting bridge tolls would be a change of heart for Governor Pataki, who flatly opposed them during his reelection campaign last fall.

"We want to bring people into the city, we want to bring jobs into the city, we want to get companies to come back, and I don t think you do it by raising the cost of getting people to come here," Mr. Pataki told the editorial board of the Daily News in October.

Since the election, the governor has come under pressure to help the city resolve its most serious financial crisis since the 1970s, including a $3.5 billion projected deficit for the fiscal year that begins in July.

City officials raised the stakes yesterday by announcing the layoffs of almost 2,000 school employees, on top of 3,400 layoffs that were announced Monday.

Meanwhile, the state faces a $12 billion deficit. In his budget, Mr. Pataki declined to raise broad-based taxes, but included increases in state university tuition, the sales tax on clothing, a new surcharge on hospital revenues, and various other fees and narrow taxes.

A spokesman for the governor's budget office confirmed that tolls were discussed in a meeting between Mr. Miller and two of Mr. Pataki's top aides, secretary to the Governor John Cahill and Budget Director Carole Stone. But Mr. Quinn added that the governor still has "real concerns" about the proposal.

"I would say the concerns about the proposal that the governor has expressed in the past still stand," Mr. Quinn said. "The issue was discussed at the meeting because it's currently part of the mayor's budget proposal."

Mr. Miller and other city officials, including several members of the City Council and Manhattan President Virginia Fields, trooped to the Capitol yesterday to press their plea for help.

"We need a commuter tax," Mr. Miller said before the meeting. "We need money."

Mr. Miller said the city could cut its police force in half, cut off funding for the arts, and close every library, senior center, and afterschool program and still have a deficit of more than $1.5 billion.

"We are in a full-blown, total meltdown fiscal crisis," he said.

Mr. Bloomberg has left the details of his bridge toll plan vague. He has spoken of using high-tech devices to collect the money electronically without the need for traffic-snarling toll booths, but he has not said what the fee would be.

The New York Sun reported in January that mayoral aides met with officials of the Metropolitan Transportation Administration, an agency controlled by the governor, to discuss the logistics of having the MTA collect the tolls.

The response in Albany has been mixed.Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Republican, has endorsed the idea, but Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, argues that it wouldn t produce revenue soon enough to help the city this year.

Speaker Miller is opposing bridge tolls until the mayor provides more details of how they would work, Mr. Baldassaro said.

No consensus has formed around any of the major ideas for bailing out the city. The governor and majority Republicans in the Senate oppose reviving a tax on suburbanites who commute to work in the city, which was repealed in 1999.

Mr. Bloomberg's proposals for shielding the city from personal-injury suits are meeting resistance in the Democrat-led Assembly.