Taxpayers Outside Maryland Shouldn’t Pay To Rebuild a Toll Bridge Inside Maryland
Federal taxpayers will cover the full cost of rebuilding Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge if Congress approves a major spending bill this week.
The toll bridge, which carried Interstate 695 across the entrance to Baltimore’s harbor, was destroyed in March when a container ship collided with one of its supports. Rebuilding the bridge will cost an estimated $1.9 trillion.
Funding for the bridge is included in the 1,500-page stopgap spending bill that will avert a government shutdown and keep federal programs running until March. The package is expected to pass before the end of the week.
Maryland lawmakers and other public officials had been lobbying heavily for the federal government to pick up the tab for a new bridge. In a joint statement issued on Tuesday, Sens. Ben Cardin (D–Md.) and Chris Van Hollen (D–Md.) said the federal funds will allow the bridge “to be built as quickly as possible”
They also promised that federal taxpayers would be “reimbursed through proceeds from insurance payments and litigation” against the company that owns the ship that collided with the bridge.
Hopefully, that works out, but it would have been better not to ask federal taxpayers—many of whom will never use the bridge—to pay for this in the first place.
As noted above, the old Key Bridge was a toll bridge, and the replacement is likely to be tolled as well. Indeed, Maryland officials have been complaining about how the loss of toll revenue from the bridge has affected other projects in the state.
That should raise an obvious question: Why can’t the future toll revenue from the Key Bridge pay for the rebuilding of the Key Bridge?
“Those tolls were paid by Key Bridge users presumably for the capital and operating costs of that bridge,” wrote Robert Poole, director of transportation policy for the Reason Fou
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