Especially now, tollway perk should go

“I don’t think the tollway should subsidize commuting,” Illinois Toll Highway Authority Executive Director Kristi Lafleur said in August 2010.

She was answering reporters’ questions about the perk of free passage through toll booths for most toll authority employees.

But a year later, 73 percent of tollway employees still have so-called nonrevenue transponders — IPASS devices that let them skip paying tolls and are allowed to be used for work-related trips and for daily commuting to and from their tollway jobs.

And now, while the 1,159 tollway workers drive through toll booths without paying, the rest of us are looking at our tolls nearly doubling.

Lafleur and the tollway board members could authorize that rate hike today to fund a $12 billion, 15-year construction program that includes building a new bypass along the western edge of O’Hare International Airport, extending the Elgin-O’Hare Expressway to the airport, widening and rebuilding I-90, and building an interchange at I-57 and the Tri-State, among other projects.

If the tollway board votes for the increase, you’ll pay 95 cents with an I-PASS for what are now 50-cent tolls, 75 cents for 40-cent tolls and 45 cents for 25-cent tolls. Many tollway employees won’t during their commutes.

Last year, free toll passage by 1,344 employees cost the toll authority $228,957 in revenue it did not receive.

The toll authority surely isn’t the only employer still offering perks to workers. Many department stores, restaurants and industries, for instance, give employees discounts on their products.

But for the tollway, the public has to make up for the employees’ unpaid tolls, and that’s an important distinction.

The toll authority points out it cut its 2011 budget by 4 percent and it has saved money in other areas. Yet, if toll-free commuting for employees was, as the agency’s director indicated, a bad idea a year ago, it’s even more suspect now.

Before asking the rest of us for a substantial toll increase, especially during such difficult economic times, tollway directors should make sure they’ve cut every unnecessary expense, and a free commute for employees is certainly one area that could be trimmed. That it hasn’t been leaves us to wonder what else is on the table that the agency is failing to consider.

“It’s a false argument if you ask others to pay more but are not cutting back in easy ways,” said state Sen. Susan Garrett, a Lake Forest Democrat.

Tollway officials told Daily Herald staff writer Marni Pyke that they’re collecting data on employee use of the nonrevenue transponders. Once that information comes in, the free tollbooth passage might end, a spokewoman said.

We’ll be waiting.