Major Moves

It's quite a catchy name for the deal to lease the Indiana Toll Road to an Australian-led consortium for 75 years. The deal seems to have passed narrowly last night on a party-line vote in the State House. The lease deal is a front-loaded payment of 3.8 billion dollars, which is a lot of money for Indiana, even though not all that much by Washington DC standards.

The deal is supposed to fund the I-69 project that finally provides interstate access to the Evansville area. Without the lease deal, the I-69 project was not going to happen for at least another 10 years, and maybe never. And the governor and his supporters are crowing about all the other road projects this deal will fund.

It seems that most of the state doesn't really care one way or another who runs the Toll Road. It crosses the northernmost part of the state, practically within sight of the Michigan border. It's used by plenty of Hoosiers who live in places like Valparaiso, South Bend, Elkhart, my home town of Goshen, and Fort Wayne as a quick route to Chicago or Cleveland.

The people most affected by this deal are those Northern Indiana residents who use the Toll Road routinely, some to get to work every day. They will most likely see their tolls go up, and they will go up dramatically. They can choose to pay the increased tolls or take alternate routes.

I've been on that Toll Road many times in my lifetime, and the major advantage is that it's generally been a fairly clear highway. Traffic on that highway has never been terribly heavy in my experience, and it is a fast means of crossing northern Indiana. Personally, it's not that important to me whether the lease deal happened or not. I am curious to see how the new managers do with the deal, like just how high they will raise tolls, whether the higher tolls will cause already light traffic on the highway to get even lighter, how well or poorly they maintain the road, and what sort of roadside rest stops and food services they offer.

My predictions on the outcome of this deal are these:

1. Tolls will go up rapidly, and within a couple of years we will probably hear about the new managers approaching the State asking them to authorize toll hikes above even those they are allowed by the contract, complaining that their costs somehow turned out to be higher than they expected.

2. We will probably see the I-69 project completed, but we won't hear much about all the other road and bridge improvements the governor promised. That's because if you give any legislature that much cash, they are guaranteed to find plenty of ways to blow it on pet projects that have nothing to do with infrastructure.

3. In about 20 years, there will be some sort of crisis over the unforseen consequences of this deal. The crisis will have something to do with a cash-strapped legislature looking around for new sources of revenue and cursing former governor Daniels for giving the Toll Road away back in '06. Of course, by then they will have forgotten the fact that the Indiana Toll Road under government management never turned a profit.

One thing is becoming apparent. Whether all of the changes Gov. Daniels has pushed through in his brief time in office benefit Indiana in the long run will take the long run to find out. And that's too far in the future to give him much of a shot at re-election to a second term. Between the huge numbers of Hoosiers upset with him over Daylight Savings Time and the controversy of the Toll Road deal, it doesn't seem possible for him to hold the governor's seat against any credible opponent next election.