MEDIA MURDER Penna pike pounded by Philly paper

MEDIA MURDER

Penna pike pounded by Philly paper

The Pennsylvania Turnpike’s head office building looks out south over the mainline of the turnpike in the foreground and then over the wide Susquehanna River. The river is braided into islands and the whole valley and floodplain is heavily treed, a pretty prospect especially in the fall, and the only further intrusion on the silvan landscape is the shapely concrete condensation tower of the Three Mile Island nuclear powerplant a couple of miles away — infamous the world over for a great nuclear reactor “disaster,” some years back, one of those media “disasters” in which noone was hurt, let along killed. The Penna pike administration survived too. Some wonder whether it can survive the radioactive fallout from the direction of the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER (PI) however. The state’s largest paper ran a three part series and editorial late Oct tearing apart the institution.

The major thesis of the series is that the turnpike is an institution designed to provide perks for politicians and their friends and that without this patronage racket there would be cheaper roads throughout the state. They led off by quoting the state governor in 1985 Dick Thornburg as saying the only reason the turnpike was not abolished during his term was that it was “too big of a patronage haven for Democrats and Republicans,” adding that legislators on both sides had “too great an interest” in its preservation. Said the Gov: “My fondest hope was to get rid of the Turnpike Commission. It serves no use. The turnpike could be run more efficiently by the state DOT. That was my belief then. That’s my belief now.”

A graph shows turnpike staff growing from 1560 in 1957 to almost 2400 now, though there has been a negligible increase in turnpike mileasge since then.

Thomas Larson a longtime PennDOT head was quoted: “You have a bloated bureaucracy, you have patronage that is egregious, and contracts that are poorly managed.”

The chairman of the House Transp Committee Richard Geist: “The turnpike is totally a plaything of the (state) Senate.” Other politicians charge the pike “exists as much to provide jobs for the friends and relatives of Dem and Repub politicians as it does to provide a thoroughfare for drivers.”

The PI hits on the pike for:

• having the second highest tolls in the country, after FL

• being a corrupt source of contracts for engineers, construction companies, lawyers, bankers etc in return for political contributions

• overstaffing based on 3 employees/mile compared to 1/mile of PennDOT

• denying Pennsylvanians the benefit of electronic tolling in order to protect toll collectors, many of whom are ‘patronage’ workers

• spending billions on non-paying and questionable toll roads in western PA

The PI says the pike’s “narrow medians and short entrance ramps make it a dinosaur among superhighways.”

They quote John Durbin as saying soon after his appointment as exec dir that he inherited a “political whorehouse” and Transp Sec Brad Mallory as saying it has “inflated staff levels” and that it had got into financial difficulty through “patronage at top levels.” Both had later said they’d been misunderstood. The PI says based on a review of the turnpike payroll “the turnpike functions as an employment agency for party workers and friends and relatives of the politially connected.” And it quotes several employees as saying they got jobs by speaking to political party hacks.

The PI says the pike’s commission does most of its discussion, including contract awards, behind closed doors in contravention of the law.

“In 1985 the bond debt that financed the turnpike was $65m, small enough that it could easily have been paid off. In (state capital) harrisburg the talk was not about whether to take down the toll booths, but whether the Democrats or the Republicans would exert control over the Commission. The solution was a compromise: there would be new road projects and both parties would share the political spoils.”

It knocks the Beaver Valley Expy (T-60) a 28km north-south feeder build across across the mainline in 1992 for $250m for having traffic forecasts of 29k veh/day and getting 14k. It’s now 19k. And the Greensburg Bypass (T-66), a 21km northern spur off the mainline which opened in 1993 after $290m expense with a forecast of 23k veh/d and actual traffic of c13k. It is still about the same low level.

The Mon-Fayette Expwy (MFE) now under construction it says has been dubbed “a road to nowhere” — a bit rough on West Virginia and the Interstate highway system! But Fayette Co in which much of the MFE is located has only 145k people.

Toll increases of 30% in 1987 and 1991, a cent a gallon oil franchise tax and even vehicle registration money goes to the turnpike for these political roads, the PI charges.

In New York, the PI says, MTA B&T has eliminated 122 positions and expects to recover its $60m investment in e-toll by 2000 while realizing net savings of $11.5m/yr. The NYS Thruway eliminated half its rush hour collectors at the Tappan Zee with ETC. The South Jersey operator of the Atlantic City Expwy is quoted as saying ETC savings will allow toll increases to be avoided. By contrast the Penna pike was avoiding going to electronic because this “could threaten the jobs of 1,000 toll collectors.”

(Penna pike staff have indeed expressed the unusual view that electronic tolling will not reduce costs, whereas the NY State Thruway says electronic tolling is one third of the cost of attendant collection.)

A second article headlined “Elsewhere electronics reduces jams at tollgates” is devoted entirely to reportage of the success of ETC in New York, both in saving money and in improving throughput at the toll plazas.

A third article charges that the pike “awards millions of dollars in contracts to consultants, engineers, construction firms, bond underwriters and others with ties to top officials and to top state politicians. It quotes David Levdansky a Pittsbugh area Dem as saying there is widespread “pinstripe patronage” at the pike. $2b worth of bonds have been issued without competitive bids since 1986.

“Political considerations are routinely a factor in the turnpike's selection of bond underwriters, turnpike documents show. The documents list turnpike bond deals with the name of the underwriting firms, their share of bonds and their profits, and the political party that sponsored them. The commission has issued or refinanced more than $2b in bonds to pay for road projects since 1986. Turnpike officials said the bonds were split 50-50 between the parties....Several studies have concluded that municipal bond issuers pay significantly higher costs on negotiated underwritings, such as the turnpike's, than on competitively bid offerings.”

State Sen. Allen Kukovich (Dem), a veteran legislator, said the turnpike's bond business "just seems to be paybacks to political folks all the time."

A commissioner Robert Brady is quoted as complaining of waste. It cites evidence that a former commissioner Robert Gleason and GOP activist used his power on the commission to drum up business for his insurance agency.

A final fussilade came in an editorial Oct 29, 1997 titled “Turnpike run as a sty for patronage, inefficiency.” It reads:

“It's time for some road rage in a good cause. So listen up, drivers whose daily grind includes crawling along in the two- and three-mile backups routinely leading to the congested Penn Turnpike interchanges around Philadelphia and King of Prussia: You're being played for fools.

“You waste the equivalent of five days a year in tollbooth tie-ups. You turn over coins by the fistful to feed a bloated bureaucracy with a boundless appetite for jobs and contracts for the politically connected. And you pay more per mile for the privilege of driving the 506-mile turnpike than the users of every other U.S. toll road, save one.

“Anybody feel like leaning on the horn, hard?

“The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission is that dinosaur of government agencies, the unabashed patronage mill. As Inquirer staff writers Robert Moran and Rich Heidorn detailed in articles since Sunday, the number of turnpike jobs seems to grow in proportion to calls for cutbacks. The turnpike has four workers for every mile of road, while the state Department of Transportation gets along with one worker for every three miles of highway. Critical audits come, and they go.

“The high tolls come thanks not only to the payroll, but also to the cost of dubious multibillion-dollar extensions of the turnpike out west. Have any doubt that the commission is more about jobs for the connected than service for the motorist?

“Look at those tollbooth tie-ups. There's a technological remedy out there -- the automated fare-collection system in use on the New York Thruway and Hudson River crossings. Cars can zip through the E-ZPass system tollbooths at the rate of 800 an hour, as opposed to only 300 with a toll-taker.

“But is the Pennsylvania Turnpike rushing E-ZPass to the aid of traffic nightmares like the Valley Forge and Route 1 interchanges? No, a spokesman admits, officials are "sitting back and watching and learning from [ other agencies' ] mistakes." Yes, and choosing not to rock the boat by applying a technology that might trim the number of patronage jobs.

“No one at the Turnpike Commission or in the Ridge administration seems to be looking at the economic costs of turnpike tie-ups. For instance, won't King of Prussia sputter as an engine of the region's retail economy if people can't get there in a timely fashion?

“As for the commission itself, that seems to be a hands-off area for the normally businesslike GOP administration -- and, no, Democrats can't boast, either. Dividing the turnpike spoils is a bipartisan game. Rather than professionalizing the top ranks, the commission remains as inbred as ever. Bond deals and other contracts continue to boost costs unnecessarily. And rational calls for a merit-based hiring system have been ignored while lawsuits alleging favoritism have cost the commission more than $3 million.

“Asking for reform from the very players who control and benefit from the current system is a long shot. Some sweet deals for insiders will have to be undone to put the turnpike on a more businesslike footing -- with tolls going to provide service to those who pay them.

“Road rage, anyone?”

Reaction: We asked for an interview to discuss the series but a spokesman said the commission has not decided how or whether it will respond. She said many of the charges were “old stuff.” The newspaper had had 2 reporters on the job for “over a year” and not come up with much new.

Privatization would be seem to be the obvious solution for most of the ills of the Penna pike as outlined by the paper. An enterprise whose shares were traded in the capital markets would be accountable to investors and could not survive the poor return on capital resulting from job padding, contract favoritism, cavalier attitudes toward technological advance, and other inefficient practices. Also an investor owned pike would not be given access to dedicated tax funds or fees, and it would not undertake uneconomic new roads. And it might set tolls closer to economic rather than political levels.