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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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Posted Friday February 17, 2012 by Melinda Penkava