-By Warner Todd Huston
Kirk Dillard, one of the several GOP candidates for Governor, is taking issue with fellow candidate Jim Ryan’s prescription to ease the state’s budget crunch. Earlier today, Jim Ryan proposed that the state lease its tollways to a private company in order to reap a lump sum payment to fill in the holes of the current budget mess.
The tollway idea was among many ideas that Ryan proposed.
State Senator Kirk Dillard released a statement regarding lambasting Jim Ryan’s support of privatizing the tollway.
It sounds like Jim Ryan is taking a page out of Rod Blagojevich’s playbook and looking for short-term solutions to the state budget problems. It’s a risky scheme that threatens motorists, primarily suburban drivers, with massive toll increases and could put current bondholders in jeopardy.
When other states have privatized their toll roads, tolls have skyrocketed, just like parking meter rates in the city of Chicago. I successfully worked with then State Senator and current Congressman Peter Roskam to protect motorists when Blagojevich tried to do the same thing.
Let’s not lose site of the fact that suburban drivers have tossed hundreds of millions of nickels, dimes and quarters into the toll baskets for the past 50 years. The only way I would even consider leasing the tollway is if there is a guarantee the money would be used for infrastructure and after consultation with economists, transportation experts and leaders from areas served by the toll roads.
As the Chicago Tribune notes, Dillard wasn’t the only candidate to skewer Ryan’s proposal.
Ryan’s tollway proposal drew fire from another GOP contender, state Sen. Bill Brady, of Bloomington, who said a long-term lease or sale of the Chicago region’s tollway “is opening the door to a very dangerous practice” of dumping assets for a short-term “temporary fix.”
“I would consider privatizing the tollway only if it could be managed better for the taxpayers and drivers, but our track record in Illinois suggests that would not be the case,” Brady said in a statement.
Ryan leads the GOP pack in name recognition and says he’ll begin TV and radio ads this month.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, and the New Media Journal, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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