Look to tollway for future of toll bridge

What in the world is the matter with us, the citizens of Kane County? We ought to be up in arms to have the likes of Bill Wyatt heading up the Kane County Board's transportation committee and the Longmeadow Parkway Toll Bridge Task Force.

I don't know Wyatt personally, but when I read that he has a "gut feeling that the bridge will be used" as he said at the recent task force, it made my blood boil.

Wyatt and his committees would do well to research the history of the Illinois Tollway system rather than having a "gut feeling." They will find that the Illinois tollway system is one of the biggest rip-offs in Illinois for the citizens of our state. Just like the tollway system, a toll/tax for the use of a bridge will be a haven for job political patronage, not saying anything about the political corruption. It will be a bridge for the well-off, as the tollway is today, and not for the poor soul that can't afford to pay a toll/tax.

Using the bridge going to and coming from the job, five days a week, will cost the average driver $760 a year. Think about what you can buy with $760.

For Wyatt and his committee members to give us the old sales pitch that "when the bridge is paid for we will drop the toll/tax" is a political betrayal of the trust we should have in our governmental leaders. To refresh their memory they should recall that it was our state legislators that said the same thing; they promised in the 1950s that once the tollway roads were paid for they would become freeways. Once the bridge is paid off, our county leaders at that time will say as our state legislators say today: "I wasn't around when that promise was made, and you will continue to pay until I tell you not to pay."

If citizens of Kane County don't let their county leaders know that they don't want a toll/tax bridge in Kane, they deserve what they get.

Russell Johnson

Sugar Grove