Whether black-and-whites should pay tolls
is a gray issue

Monday, January 08, 2007

Ben Wear, Austin American-Statesman

The Central Texas toll roads, as you may have heard, began charging Saturday — other than for people with toll tags, who won't start paying until next month.

And "emergency vehicles." Well, some of them anyway.

And therein lies a deceptively complicated tale, and choice, for toll road operators like the Texas Department of Transportation.

The agency, at least based on comments at a Texas Transportation Commission meeting in December, would like to waive the tolls only for marked police cars, fire vehicles and ambulances in the act of responding to an incident.

That might mean, in practice, only those vehicles running with lights and sirens going. And maybe, officials said, a free drive might be OK for marked police cars doing routine patrolling on a toll road.

All other public safety vehicles, under this rubric, would have to pay.

Some leading Central Texas cops spoke at that December commission meeting against this limited toll amnesty. They want all police vehicles exempted.

They argue that the state is making a false distinction, or at least an unproductive one.

And for every $50,000 the Austin Police Department pays in tolls each year, well, that's one less rookie cop who could have been hired to keep you and me safe.

The state, meanwhile, is trying to stay off what they see as the slippery slope of toll forgiveness, and thus lost revenue. Let all police vehicles off the hook, the thinking goes — including, for instance, a cop in an unmarked or marked car driving home from work — and before long, you'll have Austin library advocates saying Bookmobiles should drive free.

After all, every $15 of tolls is one less book that the perpetually strapped library department could have bought.

What about school buses? And parks vehicles? Meals on Wheels? And so on.

But back to the cops. The problem in making such distinctions is how the toll system works.

Start with the assumption that police agencies would get toll tags for all of their cars, if for no other reason than to get the 10 percent discount from cash tolls. They also wouldn't have to stop at toll booths, which is the main argument for exempting them from tolls in the first place.

Those overhead electronic toll tag readers, however, aren't equipped to distinguish between a marked cop car with lights flashing on its way to an assault and an unmarked car with crime scene investigators.

So, in practice, what would have to happen is that all tollway trips would be charged to the police department.

Then, to get tolls forgiven after the fact, individual cops would have to keep a log of their toll road driving and note when they were in an active emergency and when not. Which means there'd have to be some administrative types on the force handling this accounting process, and dealing (haggling) with the tollway folks.

Not good.

And not an easy policy decision either. Police cars aren't exempt from the gas tax, after all. Should tolls, which are really just a gussied-up tax, be any different?

Getting There appears Mondays. For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.