Don’t ask for whom the tolls.

tonygRep. Tony Guerrera, D-Rocky Hill, seems resigned to the inevitability of highway-toll legislation this session, as a way to keep the Special Transportation Fund afloat during this period of lower gas prices and sharply reduced fuel taxes for the STF. Guerrera, the co-chairman of the legislative Transportation Committee, saw his panel raise a bill yesterday for a public hearing. That’s the first step toward tolls.

“This is something I’ve been talking over the last five years, that the gas tax cannot substantiate the money that we need for infrastructure,” he said after the committee meeting. “With all the new cars, with all the hybrids and electric czars we have out there, no one’s going to be going to the pump every week. They’re going to be going maybe once every two weeks, once a month, and some of them won’t even be going to the pump at all. So we have to think of another mechanism to fund these projects. And one of them could be tolls. Oil prices have dropped dramatically and that has a big effect on all of us, in regards to consumers, who like that. But there’s a flip side to that because now we’re not going to be making as much money as we like to…We may have to look at different ways to fund infrastructure. If tolls isn’t going to be it, then show me some other way to fund it, because I’m not getting it from the feds and I’m going to get it from the gas tax. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure this out. We need something to fund our projects and to keep up our infrastructure to make sure they don’t fall apart.”