By Guy Page
Should the State of Vermont adopt tolls on roads to make up for declining Transportation Fund revenue?
The Transportation budget faces a $33 million shortfall this year. Growing use of EVs, increasingly fuel-efficient gasoline/diesel cars and trucks, and people working at home rather than commuting have conspired to reduce purchasing at the pump – where the Transportation Fund gets most of its funding. So now both interested residents and state legislators are looking elsewhere.
Gov. Phil Scott yesterday recommended clawing back $10 million of Transportation Fund revenue, previously allocated for education, back to road and bridge construction and repair. If approved by the Legislature, a $23 million hole in the budget will remain. Some Vermonters are recommending toll roads.
“We should, if we were smart, have tolls on I-89 and 91, Canadian border crossings, ferry services, if not all 6-7 entry points into our state,” Mary Alice Callahan of Milton said while visiting the State House Tuesday. “I see people during every season whether it’s leaf peeping or summertime or winter, skiing and riding, heading up to Stowe and Smuggs, half of them have out of state plates.”
Lawmakers Tuesday told VDC that federal authorities do not provide transportation funding to states that exact tolls on the federal Interstate highway. Most out-of-staters enter Vermont via the Interstate, while the state highways have less traffic (therefore less revenue) and serve a higher proportion of instate residents.
“It comes up every year,” House Ways & Means (tax) committee member Charlie Kimbell (D-Woodstock) told VDC.
To learn more about how a modern toll road works, the Senate Committee on Transportation met in the morning of Tuesday January 20 and heard testimony from Mark Dufflin, the Chief Sales Officer of Emovus. Emovus is the technology and operations division of their parent company Abertis, which operates toll roads around the world.
Committee Chair Sen. Richard Westman (R-Lamoille) explained that this testimony is part of an ongoing exploration to address the falling revenue from the gas tax. The committee has been taking testimony from actors in states that have eliminated the gas tax in favor of other funding sources, which include mileage based user fees.
Dufflin explained the specifics and nuances of their business model and how they have been able to help states create systems for road user charging (RUC) systems. He also highlighted three different policies to implement these systems: manual reporting, OBD (onboard device), and vehicle telematics.
“One way is simple manual reporting, where the driver, the owner of the vehicle on a monthly or even annual basis reports their miles and you take the difference between the two dates and you charge a fee based on the number of miles. Sometimes that fee is a flat fee up to a certain number of miles, and then it increments based on a variable fee. It depends on your policy and how you want to implement the system.”
The second system, OBD’s, requires the vehicle owner to install a device into the vehicle’s information bus which will accurately record mileage. These devices are commonly used in the insurance industry, but they are expensive and rely on user cooperation which Dufflin explained can be a challenge.
The third system, vehicle telematics, is a system that already exists in many vehicles, especially electric cars. “…we can tap into those on a wireless basis with driver approval, and they sign the forms, and then we can access the mileage through that.”