The wheels are turning at the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission. After Gov. Edward G. Rendell approved a transportation funding bill last month, the commission is now readying a $450 million bond anticipation note sale for the first week of October. “We are moving ahead full speed on implementing the funding plan set forth by Gov. Rendell and the Pennsylvania General Assembly in Act 44,” commission vice chairman Timothy J. Carson said.Act 44 allows the commission to issue up to $5 billion of special revenue bonds with no more than $600 million of those bonds to be issued in one year. In a “public-public” partnership, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission will lease Interstate 80 from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and begin tolling that road. Additionally, the commission will pay PennDOT annual cash lease payments, starting with $750 million for this fiscal year, paying PennDOT a total of $57.6 billion over a 40-year period. The $450 million Ban deal would be enough to pay the first couple of quarterly payments, Carson said.On Tuesday the commission approved a resolution to move ahead with the financial planning, and at its Aug. 28 public meeting, they will decide whether to formally adopt that resolution in the form of the note borrowing, Carson said.Implementation of the transportation law comes at a time when Pennsylvania is in urgent need of bridge and road repair. PennDOT released this week sufficiency and condition ratings for 54 steel deck truss bridges to provide additional data on its bridges after a similarly structured bridge collapsed on Interstate 35 in Minneapolis on Aug. 1.Of the 54 deck truss bridges, seven were considered structurally deficient, according to PennDOT. Moreover, nearly 6,000 state-owned bridges in the commonwealth are considered structurally deficient out of the commonwealth’s 25,000 state-owned bridges. The commonwealth has the largest number of structurally deficient bridges in the nation, according to PennDOT, and ranked by state, it contains the third highest number of bridges. While structurally deficient bridges are still considered “safe,” they are in need of “costly repairs or replacement to bring [them] to current standards,” according to PennDOT’s Web site.Last year, PennDOT invested an unprecedented $558 million of state and federal funds in 894 bridge projects statewide. With Act 44 put in place, PennDOT can expect $750 million more of funds this year, of which $450 million will go to bridges and roads, and $300 million will fund mass transit, Carson said. The amount PennDOT receives from the commission will increase each year, and PennDOT will receive about $532 million per year on average for bridges and roads for the next 10 years.To put Pennsylvania’s transportation woes into perspective, PennDOT spokesperson Rich Kirkpatrick said that if PennDOT were to address each bridge and road that is in need of repairs now, it would cost at least $8 billion.“We face huge challenges,” Kirkpatrick said. “But with this new revenue package, we’ll continue to make more progress at chipping away at those challenges.” Another challenge that the commonwealth faced recently was when two U.S. House Republicans from Pennsylvania, Reps. John E. Peterson and Phil English, pushed through an amendment in late July to the annual federal transportation funding bill that would essentially prohibit Pennsylvania from tolling I-80. The House approved the bill, and it now sits with the Senate. While the passing of this amendment could somewhat curtail Pennsylvania’s transportation funding plans, state officials say they understand that the final bill will not include that amendment. “We have been assured as we have spoken to almost everybody of relevance in Washington that the Peterson-English amendment will be stripped from any final appropriations bill,” Carson said. “We are very confident that will not be part of the final appropriations bill.”
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