Posted on 07/12/2022 10:06:01 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Pennsylvania could continue to work with a partnership headed by an Australian firm to replace nine major bridges across the state and maintain them for for 30 years.
It just has to find another way to pay for the work now that adding tolls of $1 or $2 per vehicle is off the table.
The state Department of Transportation continues to review how it will replace the bridges, which are estimated to cost $2.5 billion. They are considered economically important structures, but the state said it doesn’t have the funds to replace them.
One possibility is that the state continues in a public-private partnership with Bridging Pennsylvania Partners, a group of contractors and investors led by Macquarie Infrastructure Developments LLC, which was chosen as part of the tolling proposal.
“There’s just a lot up in the air right now,” said Alexis Campbell, a PennDOT spokeswoman. “I think the path forward is still to be determined. The payment plan is the biggest issue.”
Gov. Tom Wolf officially signed a bill Monday that was approved by the General Assembly on Thursday that puts more restrictions on how pubic-private partnerships can be established. The administration agreed to drop the plan to toll the nine bridges — including the Interstate 79 bridge near Bridgeville — and change the law after Commonwealth Court ruled in two cases filed by communities around bridges scheduled for tolling. The court ruled that the state should have notified the communities and gotten comments from them before the Public-Private Transportation Partnership Board voted on the tolling idea.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
PING!
Did the original article state this? If so, where are the editors?
So Pennsylvania can’t pay for bridge repair. Maybe Pennsylvania should declare itself to be part of Ukraine. Then all sorts of money would flow its way.
Of course it was in the original article.
And I would like to vacation on a 150’ yacht if I could just find a way to get somebody else to pay for it.
I'm so old I remember when even Dims were outraged by Sandusky.
“Maybe Pennsylvania should declare itself to be part of Ukraine. Then all sorts of money would flow its way.”
Maybe Pennsylvania can stop participating in the theft of presidential elections, and then maybe more of us would care.
Why not take some money from the gubmint union pension funds? Worked out well for the mob and the teamsters union. That’s how they built Las Vegas.
How about cutting all the socialist spending in the budget and actually using the gas tax for it’s original intent? It’s obvious that PennDot is filled with morons and lazy ass unionized employees (aka bridge sitters - you see the sitting at every road construction site instead of working) These lazy asses need to unemployed and forced to work in the private sector. The days of permanent government employment and no fear of layoffs needs to end. These eff’n lazy asses didn’t lose their jobs during COVID shutdowns even though they sat on their lazy asses and surfed porn from home. They are the problem. Wait until unemployment kicks in this autumn. They need to pay the price, not hardworking Pennsylvanians.
This is Easy to fix:
Issue an Executive Order mandating ALL public employee’s in the State, immediately enroll in Obamacare and purchase their own health insurance. Use the money save to pay for the Bridge Replacements.
As an added bonus you could also mandate all government vehicle exclusively be Green and All Electric and use the funds no longer spent on planet destroying fossil fuels, be used for road repair.
Too many politicians siphoning off the public treasury to actually be able to take care of the infrastructure. It’s a problem everywhere. In my city, the public rejected building a new coliseum by referendum. Now we have three but the streets still don’t get fixed.
If Pennsylania and Texas led ALL the states to effectively "secede" from the unconstitutionally big federal government by repealing the 16th and 17th Amendments (16&17A), thus putting a stop to 16A-related unconstitutional federal taxes, then the following would happen imo.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
Texas Republicans Call For TEXIT Vote With 90% In Favor (7.6.22)
All the states would ultimately find a tsunami of new revenues (imo) that the states could not only use to replace infrastructure like Pennsylvania wants to do, but also increase teacher, police and fire department salaries for starters.
Patriots need to start working with their prospective new, Trump-endorsed state MAGA lawmakers to repeal 16&17A.
Insights welcome.
Pennsylvania just has too damn many bridges.
They should be like Virginia, where a 36-mile round trip to go around a closed bridge is typical.
PA doesn’t just have too many bridges. PennDOT has responsibility for too many bridges and too many miles of roads that wouldn’t be considered state roads in any other state.
Well, see, in Virginia VDOT has responsibility for almost every road that isn’t in a city, town, or the few counties that maintain their own roads.
And there aren’t many cities or towns in Virginia.
But when VDOT doesn’t have the money to fix a bridge, they just close it. So sorry, get used to driving an extra 40 miles.
PennDOT can’t close the bridges because you don’t want to know what will happen in the hills when the locals are no longer connected to civilization.
If there's one group of people whose pensions need to be tied to the state, it's government employees. At the same time, they need to be invested in private industry instead of squashing it like they do in California.
Government pensions need to be filled with only in-state companies and bonds for projects, and zero overseas investments.
Help Make America Great Again.
So,what happened to all the gas tax money. (That’s a rhetorical question by the way)🙄
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