New Jersey Toll Roads Waste $43 Million in Driver Cash
Motorists traveling through New Jersey see $43 million of money paid through tolls wasted on the bureaucracy, according to an audit released Tuesday by the state comptroller. The New Jersey Turnpike Authority is responsible for running the Garden State Parkway and New Jersey Turnpike. Its employees took funds from the continuously increasing tolls and used it to enrich themselves in a number of ways.
“While tolls are going up, the Turnpike Authority is overpaying its employees, overpaying its management, overpaying for its health plan and overpaying for legal services,” State Comptroller A. Matthew Boxer said in a statement.
The most notorious example involved a toll road property inspector who, without violating any laws, pocketed $321,985 in 2008, thanks to lavish payouts and bonuses offered at the tolling authority. Management responsible for reining in such excesses paid themselves $3 million in bonuses through the same system.
“Rather than set an example, management at the Turnpike Authority chose to piggyback off of the generous bonuses and payouts it agreed to provide its employees,” Boxer said.
Those bonuses added up to $30 million throughout the agency — or six percent of operating expenses. The authority’s 2700 full and part time employees are represented by ten labor unions which fought hard to load up their contracts with as lucrative provisions.
Bonuses are paid not based on performance. Rather, they kick in automatically. For example, those who leave the agency after ten years can get a “separation bonus” for quitting. The same individuals had they stayed would have enjoyed a “longevity bonus” boosting their salary by four percent. At fifteen years, the bonus increases to six percent. Toll collectors also received a “bank-out bonus” of up to $1650 if they counted the toll money after collecting it. Working on a holiday or one’s birthday also earned a bonus.
Other perks such as free rides on the toll road and spending $12,000 to sponsor an employee bowling league represent the culture of waste present at the authority, even if the cost is comparatively low. The authority could have also have saved $8.8 million had it simply participated in the state health benefit plan instead of running its own.
Unfortunately for the authority’s labor unions, all ten union contracts expire in 2011. Governor Chris Christie (R) has made slashing the excessive benefits found in state employee union collective bargaining agreements to be one of the top priorities of his administration. So far Christie has taken the unusual step of vetoing minutes of the meetings of various toll road authorities. The veto prevented a resolution that would have given free rides on the toll road to all employees. Christie also ordered on Tuesday that the state transportation authority eliminate annual payout for unused sick and vacation time.
[Courtesy: Thenewspaper.com]
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My brother in law works for a construction company that builds and maintains roads and bridges. His company is working on a 5 year contract to widen the turnpike between exits 6 and 9. The level of bureaucracy that he describes is astounding. Meetings after meetings, for things that should have long ago been decided. Layers of management that need convincing before the actual "decider" makes a decision. Those layers don't add value and cost money. After hearing about this mess, leasing the turnpike to a private company may not have been such a bad idea. -ted
I can't comment on the Jersey toll booth brauhaha but I can say this though, Here in Washington State, have a toll access at the Tacoma Narrow's Bridge, and it's to pay off the new bridge that had to be built alongside the old one to ease traffic congestion to the peninsula. When we lived in the West Tacoma area (1985-1999), it was not uncommon to see backups on Bridgeport and along Narrows Drive getting to Highway 16, which goes over the bridges and continues up to Bremerton, and this was during the evening rush hour and had friends who lived over on the peninsula in the town of Gig Harbor where they built their home back in the 70's. At the time, traffic was not bad but by the early 90's it was awful. So what they did was use EZ-Pass to collect the tolls on the NEW section of the bridge and I think it's $3.50, may have gone up to $4 now, I don't know and from what I understand, it will remain in effect until the bridge is paid off. Mom has one of those transponders on her windshield and she keeps $30 in her account and when she needs to go to my middle sister's place on Bainbridge Island and getting there requires a trek through the peninsula to reach the bridge onto the island itself, coming back, she gets in the EZ-Pass lane and voila, she's back in Tacoma. There is talk of expanding the EZ-Pass system and using it to also pay for the new 520 floating bridge that is in need of replacement due to age and the increased traffic across Lake Washington and the last I heard, both it and I-90 will get the toll to help pay for the new bridge, the hitch now is finding the funds to pay for the new western extension that is to solve the traffic bottleneck there for mass transit systems needing to go across that bridge. Right now, the old bridge, built some 50 years ago is only 4 lanes, 2 in each direction with no way to pull off should you break down and so almost on a daily basis you end up with that bridge being horrendous during rush hour while I-90, which is 2 bridges, one for each direction is usually better, but not always as it can become horrendous, just not as often thankfully. I believe they are working on adding light rail to I-90 as they are expanding the light rail system under Capitol Hill as we speak and there is now a light rail line to the airport and Metro Transit is adding Rapid express lines that have extended express hours and do not require a schedule as enough buses will serve the line to allow one at each stop every 15 minutes or so, the first line to Federal Way into Seattle is now online and another one has opened or will be shortly. I have not heard of any problems with the EZ-Pass system here in our state but then again I don't watch much TV and almost never catch the news anymore.