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f there was any doubt that Pamlico County residents would be the most affected — and disturbed — by coming tolls on the Minnesott and Aurora ferries, evidence could be found Wednesday night at Pamlico Community College. Nearly 500 people filled the auditorium as the North Carolina Department of Transportation took public comment for about two hours.

It was the biggest turnout of the five hearings DOT held in eastern North Carolina over the past month.

Greg Piner, with back to camera, was one of three dozen residents who spoke out against the tolls for the local ferries at Wednesday night’s DOT hearing. “This isn’t a DOT issue. This is a General Assembly issue,” Piner said to the crowd, urging them to be “very tolerant with the DOT and stringent with the General Assembly” that ordered DOT to charge tolls on the Minnesott and Aurora ferries.

The tolls weren’t the only target of the crowd’s displeasure. State Representative Norman Sanderson came in for criticism for voting for the plan and doing nothing to keep the local ferries free.

If things go thru as planned — and DOT Deputy Secretary Paul Morris gave no indication otherwise after the hearing — March 31 will end the era of free ferries residents and commuters have relied on for decades. As of April 1, drivers taking the Minnesott-Cherry Branch ferry would pay $4-7 for an average sized car. On Aurora-Bayview, a toll of $10-12 could be charged.

Three dozen residents spoke Wednesday night against the toll and when some directed their ire at the DOT Deputy Secretary, Morris noted that it was not his department’s idea but the Legislature’s mandate. He said DOT had held off imposing the tolls as long as possible and had no choice but to release its toll rate schedule next month.

Pam Yurko of Arapahoe said she’d been “hearing all night that this is a done deal. This is America,” she said, “we don’t have to put up with anything.” She urged others to “write our representatives and hound them.” In the line waiting to speak behind her was Oriental Mayor Bill Sage and Pamlico Board of Education member John McCotter who says he rides the Minnesott ferry to work and the Aurora ferry to see family.

Amid that air of inevitability, some residents were focusing their sights on the NC Legislature’s Transportation Oversight Committee which meets on March 9. An email and letter writing campaign has started and two of Wednesday night’s speakers, Greg Piner and Larry Summers of Oriental, say they may organize a bus with a contingent of Pamlico County residents to the Legislature. That may be the county’s last chance to fend off the tolls on the Neuse and Pamlico River ferries.

The Ferry Seen As A Bridge

Several speakers noted that the Minnesott-Cherry Branch ferry and the Aurora-Bayview ferries bring people to their jobs on the other side of the Pamlico or Neuse rivers. Cherry Point Naval Air Station is the employer of many people who take the ferry from Pamlico County, while the Potash phosphate plant in Aurora has workers who live on the other side of the Pamlico River.

Military veterans spoke of using the ferry to get to doctors’ appointments at Cherry Point or Morehead City. The tolls would come, others said, as Pamlico County residents are still recovering from Hurricane Irene.

Pamlico High School student Nicole Edwards (with her sister Alexis at left) spoke to the DOT about cross-country and other sports teams that take the ferry to competitions on the other side of the river. Charging the school buses would be, she said, “outrageous.” When the Arapahoe teen asked if the school buses could be exempted from paying, she was told by the DOT official that not only would the buses be subject to a toll, but so would each person on the bus. That “dollar-a-head“revelation drew audible grunts of weary astonishment from the audience.

Speaking to the DOT panel, Frederick Henderson described Pamlico County as a place “sandwiched between two ferry routes” where the ferry is more than a boat. “It’s a bridge. It’s a highway,” Henderson said of the ferry route. “This is not some vacation route. This is a road everyone out here uses and you’re going to turn it in to a toll road.”

Questions of Fairness

In the air through the hearing was a question of inequity: why should the local ferries serving area residents start charging tolls while another ferry route in North Carolina catering heavily to out-of-state tourists, would remain free.

Last June, State Representative Norman Sanderson, who represents Pamlico and Craven Counties in the State House, voted with his party’s leadership for the budget. That budget included a mandate that the Ferry Service generate $5 million dollars (that’s up from the $2 million it currently generates, and, says DOT’s Paul Morris, is a tenth of the Ferry Service’s overall budget.)

To raise that money, the Legislature specifically directed the Ferry Service to collect a toll on the two commuter ferries serving Pamlico, Craven and Beaufort counties. At the same time, the budget that Sanderson and state Senator Jean Preston voted for expressly forbade the DOT from charging tolls on two Outer Banks ferries – one at Knott’s Island in Currituck County as well as the Hattteras-Ocracoke route which serves a largely tourist clientele. (That exemption came as an favor to the two House Democrats representing the Outer Banks whose votes the GOP leadership needed to override Democratic Governor Beverly Purdue’s veto.)

On Wednesday night, the DOT’s presentation showed that if the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry paid a toll and kicked in toward the $5 million the Legislature mandated be raised, the rates on the Minnesott Ferry could be halved to $2 a ride.

Ann Holton of the Pamlico Board of Commissioners read a resolution of the board seeking exemption from tolls for the Minnesott-Cherry Branch route, as fellow commissioners Christine Mele and Kenny Heath looked on. The resolution noted among other things, that 91% of the riders on the Minnesott ferry were NC residents (a statistic drawn from a tally of license plate tags), and already paid in to the state’s coffers. The majority of riders on the ferry that remains free at Hatteras-Ocracoke are from out of state.

In his turn speaking, Oriental Mayor Bill Sage noted that much of the traffic on the Ocracoke-Hatteras ferry was likely vacationers from out of state who were “accustomed to paying tolls.” Sage suggested that if any toll were to be charged, it should fall more heavily on the ferries serving tourists and not on the river ferries serving commuters, as is about to happen.

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Focus on Representative Sanderson

Several speakers implied some of the blame for the toll lay with Representative Sanderson, who was at the hearing. (Senator Preston who announced recently she is not seeking re-election did not attend Wednesday’s meeting.) The criticism ran along the lines that, unlike the Outer Banks Representatives who kept their ferries free, Sanderson had not tried to stop the tolls for the Minnesott and Aurora ferries.

Lee Duer of Pamlico County.

There were suggestions that the lawmaker try to fix things now. Pamlico County resident Lee Duer asked that Representative Sanderson “do the right thing and introduce legislation to rescind or revise that portion of House Bill 200 (the budget) to make it fairer to the people of Pamlico County.”

Oriental Town Commissioner Larry Summers was a among those asking State Representative Norman Sanderson to take action. Summers asked if Sanderson or State Senator Jean Preston would introduce bills to postpone the tolls for three months. That could put the issue before the legislature when it reconvenes in May.

During two minutes of comments before the crowd, Representative Sanderson did not commit to working to repeal the toll for the local ferries.

“The only thing that anything might possibly can be done,” he said, “would be at the Joint Legislative Transportation Oversight committee which meets, I think the the 14th or 15th of March.” (The legislative calendar says that it meets on March 9 at 9a.)

State Representative Norman Sanderson (R-Pamlico-Craven) at Pamlico Community College’s Delamar auditorium Wednesday night.

“Nothing can be promised at this point because it is an appropriations issue,” Sanderson said, “but if anything can be done, if enough people show up to that meeting to help drive home the concerns that we have maybe something possibly can be done.” The state Representative later said in an interview that he alone could not change the committee’s mind.

To the audience, Sanderson defended his vote for the budget which slapped the tolls on the local ferries. “I voted yes,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why. Pages 1 through 500 whatever of the budget did a lot to put North Carolina back on a positive track. It lowered taxes, cut the size of government. It reduced spending.”

The budget that put tolls on the commuter ferries would, Sanderson said, “end up saving the State of North Carolina a lot of money.”

State Representative Norman Sanderson and his wife Linda at Wednesday night’s hearing. Jean Preston, the area’s State Senator who also voted for the tolls, did not attend. She recently announced she would not seek re-election this fall. After one term in the House, Sanderson is running for Preston’s Senate seat.

At that, some in the crowd called out that such savings would be, “on our backs.”

It was a point that toll-opponent Greg Piner of Oriental elaborated on when he had his turn at the microphone. “Don’t try to raise revenue on the backs of the poor people of eastern North Carolina and then brag about not raising our taxes,” Piner said. “Because you raised ‘em.”

Greg Piner at Wednesday’s DOT hearing on tolls. Piner spoke about commuting from Pamlico County to Cherry Point for 33 years. That amounted, he said, to 17,000 trips on the free ferry, before he retired. Behind him at the table were DOT Deputy Secretary Paul Morris, Ferry Services chief Harold Thomas and a consultant with CDM Smith which prepared the analysis of the system.

Piner questioned why the Legislature was so insistent that tolls on a commuter ferry be charged as a way for the Ferry Service to raise an additional $3 million dollars a year. It amounts, he said, to 45 cents per North Carolinian per year. He said the river ferries should continue to be funded entirely thru the highway tax — which ferry riders already pay into when they purchase a gallon of gas. Charging a toll on ferry commuters, Piner said, was “like trying to get blood out of a stone.”

The DOT officials said they would take in to account the comments made at the Pamlico hearing before deciding what to charge for a toll. Few at Wednesday’s hearing stated a preference for one of the four pricing options. Instead, speakers tried to make the case for why the local ferries shouldn’t have any toll at all.

Bruce Brown of Whortonsville cited a NC Statute that state roads may not be tolled. State highway maps show that Hwy 306 exists on both sides of the Neuse River. The ferry route is shown as a line of 306 going across the river. As such Brown said, it’s a highway and by law a toll can’t be charged. (The Pamlico County Commission has put Brown on the agenda for Monday night’s meeting and will consider that information.)

Bob Miller of Oriental called it was “morally reprehensible” to tell people in Pamlico County to pay ferry tolls to raise a few million dollars at the same time DOT was spending $685 million on Hwy 70 upgrades between Goldsboro and Havelock. Pamlico County residents, Miller said, were paying for those improvements through their gas tax payments so that, “people in Raleigh can get to the beaches.”

Michael Speciale, a Republican who is seeking Sanderson’s House seat representing Pamlico County, (as Sanderson is running for Jean Preston’s State Senate in the fall) asked whether the tolls could be avoided if the DOT made cuts elsewhere.

The DOT officials responded that they had made cuts as part of the budget process last year. And as he did throughout the night, the DOT’s Paul Morris reiterated that the mandate from the legislature was clear: the money had to be raised through tolls charged on the Minnesott and Aurora ferries (as well as higher tolls on three other routes, and no tolls whatsoever at Hatteras-Ocracoke and Knott’s Island on the Outer Banks.)

Ed Bryant of Pamlico County asked about the cost of implementing the tolls. The answer from DOT was that it would cost $1 million — in toll collectors’ salaries and intrastructure — in order to collect $4 million in tolls. The DOT said that the Legislature mandated that $5 million be generated, not netted.

Several speakers questioned if the toll would in fact send some current ferry riders away. Morris spoke about “elasticity” — how much a rider would think reasonable to pay for a ferry ride before being stretched so thin as to decide to drive around. A few speakers warned that ridership would fall and one suggested the tolls were a step toward the state phasing out some routes altogether. (Morris said after the hearing that DOT has already been cutting back on routes.)

Dollars to Donuts? Darryl Wiard of Florence said a toll would cut down on his travels back and forth across the river. He also suggested the DOT consider selling “coffee and Krispy Kreme” donuts to raise the money the Legislature wanted to see. A DOT official said the Ferry Service had once sold food on board the ferries, but lost money on it. It was, however, considering a private contractor to sell food on board.

Robert Cayton, vice-chair of the Beaufort County Commissioners, told the DOT that 98% of the cars on the Aurora-Bayview ferry were in-state and already paying taxes toward the DOT and the ferry service. He said that he understood it wasn’t the Ferry Service or DOT that was behind the imposition of tolls, but rather the Legislature.

A Democrat who will be running for Norman Sanderson’s state House seat, Robert Cayton asked that the DOT panel go back to Raleigh and “recommend that the North Carolina General Assembly repeal the law” that imposed the tolls.

The DOT’s Deputy Secretary Paul Morris said he couldn’t. The DOT, Morris said, is “essentially handcuffed by state law and not permitted to petition the General Assembly.” He said he couldn’t even offer information, unless asked for it, to the Transportation Oversight Committee meeting on March 9.

Left on the floor after the hearing Wednesday, a penny. Pamlico County resident Ray Reilly flipped them in the air as he spoke at the DOT hearing and suggested that if the tolls begin on April first, travelers should pay in pennies.

In January when DOT announced it was holding four hearings on the tolls, Pamlico County was not on the list. After that was reported here at TownDock.net and readers called and wrote to DOT, the hearing that took place Wednesday night was added to the list.

By Pamlico County standards, Wednesday night turnout was huge, accounting for 4% of the county’s population. It was more than double the crowd that turned up for a hearing at Ocracoke (where the subject was a hike in fares for the ferries that cross from Cedar Island and Swanquarter.)

Despite that crowd, DOT officials offered no hope that they’d not charge a toll on the two commuter ferries serving Pamlico County. Morris said DOT would come back to the Delamar Auditorium at PCC in mid-March to announce how much the tolls would be on the local ferries.

Coming out of the meeting Wednesday, several of the speakers and members of the audience seemed ready to carry on, perhaps even more forcefully than before the hearing. Larry Summers of Oriental says he’d like to see busloads of Pamlico County residents descend on the Legislature’s Joint Transportation Oversight Committee meeting on March 9. And several speakers, including Minnesott Beach mayor Josh Potter, are urging residents to contact the 20 members of that committee.

Josh Potter is Mayor of Minnesott Beach and was one of the last speakers. He told the audience to contact the Joint Transportation Oversight Committee’s 20 members before its March 9 meeting at the NC Legislature. That committee, Potter said, “is the only place we’re going to have any relief from this” and at least get the tolls postponed til the full General Assembly can take it up when it meets in May.

Emails of Senators and Representatives on the NC Joint Legislative Transportation Oversight Committee:

Phillip.Frye@ncleg.net
Grey.Mills@ncleg.net
Bill.Rabon@ncleg.net
Frank.Iler@ncleg.net
Rayne.Brown@ncleg.net
Jerry.Tillman@ncleg.net
Don.Vaughan@ncleg.net
Fred.Steen@ncleg.net
Chris.Carney@ncleg.net
Warren.Daniel@ncleg.net
Malcolm.Graham@ncleg.net
Rick.Gunn@ncleg.net
Kathy.Harrington@ncleg.net
Ralph.Hise@ncleg.net
Neal.Hunt@ncleg.net
Clark.Jenkins@ncleg.net
Mitch.Gillespie@ncleg.net
Ric.Killian@ncleg.net
Danny.McComas@ncleg.net
Jim.Crawford@ncleg.net
Tim.Spear@ncleg.net — Represents Ocracoke where the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry remains free.
Bill.Owens@ncleg.net — Represents the district where the Knott’s Island Ferry remains free.

Posted Friday February 17, 2012 by Melinda Penkava