Issue link: https://nebusinessmedia.uberflip.com/i/797109
20 Hartford Business Journal • March 13, 2017 www.HartfordBusiness.com OPINION & COMMENTARY EDITORIAL Time to bring back tolls to CT C onnecticut has an aging transportation infrastructure problem and the only logi- cal way to help solve it is by reinstating tolls. With the state's special transportation fund projected to become insolvent in three to four years and a debt crisis eroding state budget revenues, Connecticut must find new ways to invest in its infrastructure, or it risks having a transportation system untenable to employers. Already, Connecticut has some of the worst highway bottlenecks and highest con- gestion costs in the country. The problem will only be exacerbated as billions of dollars in unfunded transportation initiatives remain mired in the project pipeline. Businesses, of course, are wary of any attempts by state government to raise new revenues. We are as well, which is why any proposal to add tolls to Connecticut's inter- states must be accompanied by a legally binding promise from lawmakers to use those funds strictly for maintaining roads, bridges and highways. A transportation revenues "lockbox" has been talked about for years, but has never come to fruition. Its time has come. Maintaining safe, reliable and efficient infrastructure is as much a public safety issue as it is an economic one. In a 2014 survey by the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, businesses identified traffic as their top transportation concern. A prime reason this small state has a congestion problem is because our highways are old and weren't designed to carry the passenger loads they shoulder today. The ¾ of a mile stretch known as the I-84 Hartford viaduct, for example, was built in the 1960s and is coming to the end of its useful life. When it was first developed, the viaduct was designed to carry about 50,000 cars a day. Today, 175,000 motorists traverse the interstate daily during the workweek. The state Department of Transportation has a $5 billion plan to remake the viaduct. Meantime, U.S. Rep. John Larson has pitched a $10 billion to $12 billion plan to build a tunnel through Hartford. Funding sources for either idea remain elusive, while tolls could raise $62 billion over 25 years, according to one study. Connecticut, of course, previously hosted tolls but they were hastily expunged from our highways after a 1983 tractor-trailer accident killed seven people at the I-95 Strat- ford toll plaza. With new technology, however, tolls are a lot safer today. State lawmak- ers are currently considering several bills to adopt electronic tolling, something the state of Massachusetts now utilizes. If you take a drive to Boston today, you'll no longer get stuck in long toll lines. Instead, overhead sensors track and charge drivers via their E-ZPass or the state of Massachusetts sends a bill in the mail. There is no reason Connecticut can't adopt similar technology, especially when all of our neighboring states use tolls to help fund their transportation infrastructure. Without that revenue source, Connecticut is at a disadvantage (we are also paying higher gas taxes to make up for it). In particular, Connecticut needs to collect more revenues from out-of-state drivers who use our highways but don't help pay for them. That's why we think tolls should be placed at our borders, rather than in central Connecticut. Let's have commuters from New York and Massachusetts help foot our transportation bill. If tolls were to be adopted in Hartford, a congestion pricing strategy would make most sense. That method, which has been implemented by other cities, can take several different forms, but the basic idea is to charge higher tolls during peak demand hours to encourage drivers to travel at less congested times of day or use public transit. More specifically, we'd like to see a system that gives drivers a choice to use specially designed, electronically tolled express lanes. One possible option could be converting HOV lanes into tolled thoroughfares. Tolls will be a tough sell in Connecticut, but without more revenues our aging — even decaying — transportation infrastructure poses both safety and economic threats to the state. n HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM POLL Should CT bring back tolls to pay for infrastructure repairs? ● Yes ● No To vote, go online to HartfordBusiness.com. Last week's poll results: Is East Windsor the best location for a third CT casino? 25.3% Yes 74.7% No RULE OF LAW Nonprofit human-services sector in need of reforms By John Horak I f I had the power to give homework to the members of the state legislature, their first assignment would be a book report on the 2017 Legislative Briefing Booklet prepared by the Connecticut Community Nonprofit Alli- ance, the leading state association that speaks for our nonprofits. The booklet is a terrific document. On one level, it offers some head turn- ing, common-sense recom mendat ion s to ease the costly regulatory burden borne by the state's network of nonprofit human-service pro- viders. However, on a deeper level, there is an epiphany between its lines: Our nonprofit human-service pro- vider network is standing ready and willing to play a helpful (and perhaps leadership) role in reforming bureaucracies that have exhibited a tendency to eat their own young (at least financially) and are long overdue for reform. Let me start with the reasoned assumption that there will always be people among us who require care and assistance because they are afflicted with physical or intellectual disabili- ties, mental health conditions, broken families or other maladies of the human con- dition. There is a thin and porous line between people who have been so afflicted (directly or vicariously) and those who have not. The case for providing assistance is axiomatic, and the only question is how best to do so. Unfortunately, our system seems to have been deliberately designed to find the most complex way to get the job done. The state competes with itself. It provides human ser- vices directly with its employees (at higher wage levels and costs), and it also hires the nonprofits (the competitors) to do the same work for much less money while simultane- ously subjecting them to an impenetrable reg- ulatory regime that, as the briefing booklet says, can require the nonprofits "to maintain as many as 24 separate licenses from state agencies to operate their programs." The rub in this arrangement is that the "much less money" the nonprofits are paid is essentially 100 percent of their operating budget. This means that they depend on their high-price competitor (the state) for their existence while simultaneously trying to sur- vive under the competitor's burdensome regu- latory regime. The bizarre circularity in this arrangement is that the costs of regulatory compliance are (re)paid to the state with some of the same dollars the state paid the nonprof- its in the first place to provide services. What the state giveth it taketh away. A few years ago, when I was still practicing law, I represented a state-funded nonprofit caught in a feud between two state agencies, which could not agree if the nonprofit was out of regulatory compliance when it accept- ed into its programs a troubled individual assigned to it by one of the two agencies. After weeks of wrangling we ended up on a settlement conference call with rep- resentatives of each state agency, the state agencies' lawyers (from the attorney gen- eral's office), and the nonprofit's executive director. The case was settled when the nonprofit agreed to pay a $5,000 penalty to get the matter over with — which of course was paid with taxpayer dollars the nonprof- it had been paid by the state. Even worse, everyone involved in the set- tlement conference was being paid with tax- payer dollars in that the agency personnel and their lawyers were state employees, and the executive director's salary and my fees (like the $5,000 penalty) came from state funds that flowed through the nonprofit's budget. The Nonprofit Alliance's "head turning common sense" suggestions for reigning in the regulatory morass is found on page eight of the briefing booklet (it is on the web). On that page, the Alliance begins with some specifics about the economic burden of "com- plying with mul- tiple and redundant licensing require- ments," (noting that it is common for a nonprofit to "under- go as many as eight separate multi-day licensing reviews each year"), before putting its sugges- tion on the table — something called "deemed status." What this means is that nonprofits that have been accredited by well-known national accrediting bodies (all of which have rigorous standards) would be "deemed" to be in compli- ance, allowing them to avoid "duplicative and burdensome state licensing requirements." The booklet goes on to explain that the state already has "deemed status" protocols in place for hospitals, and that several states have adopted them for human-service providers. It is a great idea. Let me close with what I said above about the "epiphany" to be found between the lines of the briefing booklet. I have always felt that the human-service nonprofits do not get the respect they deserve. It may be because they are not businesses that cre- ate taxable wealth; it may be because, on a personal level, we prefer not to think about them because we fear personally the mala- dies they confront in the ordinary course of operations every day. Regardless, in this context the briefing booklet is a clarion call not just for regulatory reform, but for the respect the nonprofits are due for their professional acumen, willing- ness to take the lead on necessary reforms, and, of course, fulfilling that axiomatic duty to maintain the safety net we all may need at one time or another on our journey. n John M. Horak is the director of TANGO Non- profit Education and Consulting. John Horak ▶ ▶ Our nonprofit human- service provider network is standing ready to play a helpful role in reforming bureaucracies long overdue for reform.