I am touched by the spirit of compromise, coming only a day after I publicly asked Jerry Finn to consider the possibility that Southern Indiana small business owners might have justifiable concerns, based on their own everyday experience, with various publicly minted proposals to toll Ohio River bridges long before ORBP construction ever commences.
Last night, playing his strange but by now sadly customary role as eager toter of Kerry Stemler’s lunch pail, our myth-busting local Bridges Authority member confided the real numbers to Clark County’s commissioners … well, “real” insofar as wishful thinking is concerned.
“With tolls, I for one believe if it’s any more than a dollar a toll then we are in serious trouble … Our hope is that it will be significantly less than that. I know $3 tolls would be devastating to this community.” Finn added that he would never vote for imposing a $3 toll for each trip.
You can’t imagine how much better I feel today. It’s Finn’s hope that only $2 will be added to the price paid by Kentuckians for each pint of NABC beer. Certainly that’s better than $6, in roughly the same way that suicide by kitchen oven takes slightly longer than a shot fired through the temple.
Clark County Commissioners say no tolls more than $1, by Braden Lammers (News and Tribune)
After previously delaying a decision on whether or not to approve a no toll resolution relating to the Ohio River Bridges Project, the Clark County Commissioners picked up the issue again at their meeting Wednesday night and ultimately passed a resolution supporting tolls as long as they don’t exceed $1 …… “I ask you not to pay attention to those who would want you to believe that this project would have a negative impact,” (Finn) said. “I also ask that you not let the negativity of a few guide your decision on the resolution that you’re talking about tonight …
“ … My concern is if they see all of these elected groups voting [for no toll] resolutions they’re going to say, ‘why should we invest the political capital as well as the financial capital in this project?’” (Finn) said of state officials from Kentucky and Indiana.”
At least Paul Fetter wasn’t bowing to the ricocheting bullshit of unelected officialdom. Yet again, Paul clearly stated the no-tolls case in a manner that Finn did not even try to refute, and won’t, and essentially refuses to, and as time passes without so much as an attempted refutation, one must conclude irrevocably that the Bridges Authority truly has nothing to say other than to demand that we trust them as our betters.
Paul Fetter, local anti-toll representative and president of the Clark County Auto Auction, said any toll would hurt business on the Indiana side of the river.
“In the last 25 years we have made leaps and bounds to have our whole community to travel on both sides of the river freely,” he said. “If you start putting a toll up there you take freely right out of it. We cannot charge admission to come to Indiana.”
Fetter also said that imposing a toll of $1 or less would not be enough to pay back the loan needed to construct the project.
“You can’t pay the loan back charging $1 on all the bridges — it doesn’t figure,” he said. “Southern Indiana is going to be the victim of this multi-billion dollar hijacking.”
Hijacking. That’s a wonderfully descriptive phrase, isn’t it? Thanks, Paul.
