Charlotte’s toll-free loop nettles Wake (News and Observer)
Now that Wake County leaders have accepted the hard fact that local drivers must pay tolls to finance the rest of the 540 Outer Loop, they’re peeved at the news that Charlotte drivers will see their own loop finished toll-free.
“It’s a fairness issue,” Sen. Richard Stevens of Cary told Gene Conti, the state transportation secretary, at a legislative meeting this week.
Last week Gov. Bev Perdue announced a novel plan to finance the final 5-mile link of Charlotte’s congested Interstate 485 loop and to build a new interchange with I-85.
The state can afford only $290 million for a job that is expected to cost roughly $340 million, Perdue said.
So when contractors bid for the chance to design and build the two I-485 projects, they will also be asked to finance the remaining $50 million. In an arrangement used elsewhere but never before in North Carolina, the state will repay this highway loan over the next 10 years with future revenue earmarked for urban loops.
“I want it done,” Perdue said in Charlotte on Nov. 9. “And the people of North Carolina want it done.”
The state Department of Transportation was on track several years ago to start construction in 2008 on the next leg of the 540 Outer Loop in western Wake County, from Research Triangle Park south to Holly Springs. Then Conti’s DOT predecessor, Lyndo Tippett, abruptly announced that construction would be delayed until 2012 — and perhaps many years longer.
Almost overnight, the Western Wake Freeway turned into the leading candidate to become the state’s first modern toll road. ell-paid RTP workers could be counted upon to pay tolls for a faster drive to work.
After a lot of arm-twisting, Wake leaders accepted Tippett’s warning that if they insisted on seeing the freeway built without tolls, they might have to wait until 2030.
“We were told there were no other options,” Stevens said in an interview, “and now apparently there is another method.”
Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly said, “They were telling us it was the toll road or no road.”
The state Turnpike Authority is now building the 18.8-mile Triangle Expressway, which includes the Western Wake Freeway. It is expected to open for paying customers in late 2012. The remaining southern and eastern legs of the 540 Loop are expected to be toll roads also.
Urban loop money has long been a source of sibling envy in North Carolina. Charlotte officials protested the loudest two years ago when Tippett moved Fayetteville to the front of the line for a dose of scarce loop funds.
Perdue and Conti said the I-485 plan would not affect funding for other urban loops, even though it would be financed with future loop money. Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines, waiting to build his own loop, was skeptical.
“We are obviously concerned that this might divert money from our beltway,” Joines told the Winston-Salem Journal.
When Stevens commented that Charlotte and Mecklenburg County would get off without having to accept a toll road, Conti suggested that this argument wasn’t quite fair. In fact, he said, two of the state’s next three planned turnpikes will lie partly in Mecklenburg.
“The Monroe [Connector] down there in the Charlotte area is our next toll project, and the Gastonia project [Garden Parkway] is right behind that,” he said.
Conti said the design-build-finance model worked for Charlotte because it required financing for only $50 million of the project cost. It would not have been feasible to use the same method to finance several hundred million dollars on the 540 loop, he said.
