It’s the end of an era in WNY–the Breckenridge and Ogden Street Toll Barriers on the 190 (yes, in WNY we put a “the” before certain highway names) are no longer collecting their tolls. The Buffalo News Reports,
Erie County Clerk David J. Swartz shaded his eyes as he looked up at the sign with big lettering - NO TOLL - that hung above the Breckenridge toll barrier on the Niagara Thruway.
“The sun is shining in Buffalo today, literally and figuratively,” Swartz said Monday as the first wave of drivers passed by after the State Thruway Authority ended the 75-cent toll for entering the city on the Niagara Thruway.
Of course, the NYS Thruway authority gave up the tolls under pressure from a lawsuit which relied on the discovery of a law on the books which said that the tolls were supposed to end back in 1996, once the road was paid for.
The toll removal effort gained unstoppable momentum when developer Carl P. Paladino, a fervent opponent of the tolls, hired attorney Michael B. Powers of Phillips Lytle.
Powers found a law that indicated the tolls should have been removed in 1996, and a lawsuit was filed in February. After a judge refused in August to dismiss the suit, Powers said he believed eliminating the tolls would be only a matter of time.
“When we won the major victory in court, everyone got involved,” said Powers, who estimated that the Niagara Thruway toll booths had unfairly collected $110 million since 1996.
Considering the venom and soaring rhetoric that fueled the toll issue for years, the actual move to end the tolls was rather anti-climactic.
Monday morning in Albany, the Thruway Authority board quickly and unanimously accepted $14.1 million from a State Senate pork barrel account to end the 75-cent tolls at the two barriers.
This is really great news for the city–the first steps in the right direction in Buffalo in a while.
Unfortunately, despite this being motivated by the actions of private-sector individuals, politicians are, of course, trying to take credit for the toll removal…
The tolls’ removal made for a political love-fest, as Republican and Democratic officials jostled for camera time to help take credit for saving commuters $14 million a year.
That the tolls came down just eight days before Election Day was no accident.
In Albany, aides made sure a local television camera crew was on hand in the office of Michael Fleischer, Thruway Authority executive director, shortly after the vote to capture him calling State Sen. Dale M. Volker, R-Depew, with the news.
A long line of politicians, from members of Congress to state lawmakers and local officials, took credit, but the tolls’ days were numbered anyway. Both gubernatorial candidates - John J. Faso, the Republican nominee, and Eliot L. Spitzer, his Democratic opponent - already had vowed to remove them if elected.
Rep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, who had threatened to try to hold up federal transportation money if the tolls were not eliminated, said motorists only were getting what they deserved.
“Buffalo stood up for itself again - and I just think it’s very clear we were right in this argument and they were wrong,” he said of Thruway officials and others who helped block the issue for years.
Paladino said many local politicians had joined the cause only when the outcome became inevitable.
Paladino, Powers and Erie County Executive Joel A. Giambra, who threw the county’s support behind Paladino’s lawsuit, were among the first through the booths after the tolls were eliminated.
They sipped champagne from the back of a pickup truck to celebrate the moment.
“Western New York was being treated differently than the rest of the state when it comes to going from the suburbs to the city and having to pay a tax,” Giambra said. “It was just not just.”
Now the question on everyone’s mind is–how do we get back that $110 million the state wrongly took in since 1996? I certainly haven’t paid the tolls as often as some people in WNY, but there was a period of about 10 months when I paid the toll at least once and usually twice a day. Like many others, I want my money back…I know there’s been some buzz about a possible class action lawsuit. If anyone’s heard anything, let me know…