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assengers on all ferry routes in North Carolina would have to pay a toll according to the budget approved by the North Carolina Senate on Thursday. If that provision also gets the approval of the North Carolina House, the tolls would kick in on November 1.

While that’s later than the July 1 mandate to slap a toll for the first time on the Neuse River and Pamlico River ferry routes, it’s not the change that local ferry toll opponents have been pursuing. They want all tolls eliminated on all ferry routes.

One Neuse River ferry passes another on a crossing between Minnesott Beach and Cherry Branch. Tolls are due to kick in this summer. Competing House and Senate measures could mean no tolls or tolls on every ferry in NC

Competing Toll Bills: All or Nothing At All

While the Senate’s move to include the toll in its budget may surprise some, the idea to toll all ferries has been lurking in the background at the Senate for a month and a half. It was initially filed as Senate Bill 660 on April 2, in response to the House Bill 475 (and an identical Senate measure) which seeks to eliminate all ferry tolls.

There was little action on the bill until this week when the ferry toll plan appeared as pages 335-337 of the Senate’s budget and half way to becoming law. (Click here to read the three pages of the budget concerning the ferry tolls.)

Senator Sanderson’s Vote

When the budget came to the Senate on Wednesday and Thursday, the voting followed party lines, Republicans for, Democrats against. Pamlico County’s Republican Senator Norm Sanderson voted with his party in favor of the budget as written.

An aide to the Senator said Thursday that on the preliminary vote on the budget Wednesday, Sanderson spoke on the Senate floor against the ferry toll provision.

Norm Sanderson at the 2012 DOT ferry toll hearing at Pamlico Community College.

His efforts – and those of Democratic Senator Bill Cook – did not prevail. Aide Kathy Voss said that Sanderson voted for the budget rather than hold out his vote because “overall” the budget was a good one.

In Pamlico County, ferry toll opponent Greg Piner says he wished that Sanderson, a freshman Senator, had broken with his party and opposed the overall budget on principle. Piner’s spent the past year working to keep the Minnesott-Cherry Branch ferry free and saw the Senate vote as an opportunity lost.

“If it were me,” Piner said, “I’d find it hard to vote for a budget that has something in it that you know a sizable piece of your constituency is against.”

Some of the several hundred residents who turned out in March for a DOT hearing on the prospect of the tolls coming to local ferries this July.

When he was a freshman State Representative two years ago, Sanderson voted in favor of the GOP majority’s budget which spelled out tolls for the Minnesott and Aurora ferries for the first time. When, half a year later, the DOT made moves to start charging the tolls, there was a public outcry against them, and Sanderson was criticizedfor his vote. When asked why he hadn’t withheld his support in a close vote for the budget in exchange for keeping the local ferries free, Sanderson said then that he “wasn’t that kind of politician.” (He subsequently went on to win a primary and general election for Senator.)

Passenger cars and heavy trucks using the Neuse River ferry.

As his Legislative assistant reports, Sanderson did speak this time against the toll on the Senate floor, to little avail; most of the die is cast before the budget reaches there and Sanderson aide Kathy Voss notes that the Pamlico County Senator is not on the base budget appropriations committee, where many decisions are made.

What The Senate Ferry Toll Mandates Say

As with earlier dictates from the Legislature regarding the ferry tolls, this latest one from the Senate says that the tolls should generate at least 5 million dollars. It does not state what the tolls should show in terms of net gain. The all-ferries-pay-tolls provision in the Senate budget further stipulates that the tolls not generate more than 10 million dollars.

It also spells out that whatever funds are raised should go to capital improvements on the ferry system and that the monies would be distributed to ferry routes according to how much each ferry route raised. Greg Piner calls it the “beginning of the death spiral” for some ferry runs such as the Minnesott-Cherry Branch route.

Other toll opponents have said that they worry that if the tolls are imposed, fewer people will ride the ferries, resulting in a cutback of service, which would result in even fewer riders. That goes against, they say, the spirit in which the free ferries were introduced decades ago, as a substitute for bridge construction.

House Bill 475

The NC Senate’s vote to impose tolls makes what the state house does all the more important for Piner and others involved in the grassroots effort. They have been making calls and emailing House members in a bid to get House Bill 475 passed. Click here to read House Bill 475.

School buses cross the Neuse River on the ferry several times a day. Those opposed to the tolls for the ferries that are now free say the ferries are their bridges and highways and are a necessity for daily life. State transportation maps show Highway 306 extending across the Neuse River along the ferry route.

HB 475 calls for no tolls on the state’s seven ferry routes. The rationale: that the state could collect more in sales tax from increased traffic if all the ferries were free than it would bring in with the tolling mandated by the Legislature two years ago and by the Senate budget now.

A separate argument is that the few million dollars netted by the tolls represents a small fraction of the overall ferry system budget of approximately 40 million dollars, but that collecting that money will have a detrimental impact on the commuters and economies where they will be levied. The House Transportation committee was to take up HB475 on each of the past two Tuesdays but did not. Toll opponents are hoping the committee will schedule it again for this coming Tuesday May 28.

If neither measure — the all ferries tolled or no ferries tolled — can get passage in both Senate and House, the state would go with the original plan, of adding tolls to the Minnesott and Auruora ferries as of July 1.
(For more information, see TollFreeFerry.org)

Posted Thursday May 23, 2013 by Melinda Penkava