Bridging the income gap with tolls between Jeffersonville and Louisville

“Not only myself, there are a lot of other people that live over here that have to commute back and forth,” said Wynn, who spends about $15 a week on tickets and visits the Center for Lay Ministries’ food pantry.

His transportation budget won’t be affected once the downtown crossing and east-end bridge tolls are implemented next year because of a recently approved Toll Mitigation Plan.

Indiana and Kentucky agreed on the plan during a joint board Ohio River Bridges Project meeting Thursday that aims to reduce the impact of tolling on minority and low-income communities under federal standards.

While low-income residents will still have to pay tolls — $1 each way for frequent commuters — a big part of the plan is free transponders, which can be found in retail locations, for those in impoverished communities. Also, low-income residents can access a tolling account fee for $20; a typical fee ranges between $90 and $100 to register a transponder.

“From our view, these were implementable solutions that bring the greatest benefit to the community, particularly things like no tolls for TARC buses,” Kentucky Transportation Secretary Mike Hancock said. “As innocent as that may sound in some ways, for the [low-income] community, ultimately had we charged the TARC buses, there could have been the potential for TARC to have to adjust their rates in order to accommodate that.”

A marketing campaign will advertise in those communities that both Clark Memorial and Sherman Minton bridges are toll-free, and a partnership with TARC will specifically target low-income communities so they know their options.

“Those kinds of things we saw as immediate and productive types of efforts,” Hancock said.

In Indiana, the low-income areas are downtown Jeffersonville and New Albany, as well as pockets of Floyd County and areas surrounding interstates 265 and 65.

The mitigation plan will focus on areas that are low-income and could be negatively impacted by diverted traffic to the Clark Memorial and Sherman Minton bridges, but there is no eligibility required to participate.

Indiana and Kentucky conducted a formal study on toll mitigation released in June 2013 and then reached out to low-income communities for input on revisions for mitigation plan.

Already in place before Thursday was a $20 million commitment from Indiana and Kentucky to TARC to buy more buses and vans among other necessities.

Tolls will go into effect when the project is completed in 2016, charged with an electronic system with fees as low as $1 per crossing.

The joint authority will also monitor how successful these measures are and tweak implementation where needed.

Researchers scrapped two popular ideas in the process of creating the plan. One of these was to give discounts to commuters based on income level, which would involve administrative and legal issues, said. David Waldner, director of the Division of Environmental Analysis for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet.

The other was to provide low-income tax credits — but that requires changing the law.

“That’s just not something we can do,” Chuck Wolfe, spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet said.

Cathy Hinko, executive director for Metropolitan Housing Coalition in Louisville, was the only member to speak in public comment at the meeting Thursday.

She said that a TARC ride to the meeting at the cabinet’s Westport Road location would take many of the community members who the plan targets more than an hour.

“How thoughtful have they been to this community when even the very policy that will most affect them is done in a place that is significantly inconvenient for anyone in that community to be here?” Hinko said, also pointing out that no minorities were represented at the meeting.

Hinko said that while she is supportive of waiving tolls for TARC, she still believes low-income tax credits are vital to making travel affordable for low-income people.

“A lot of people are going to be severely affected by having to pay tolls,” she said. “A little inconvenience to the departments of transportation and to the state legislature is warranted.”

She doesn’t think the plan helps those communities much, especially because toll rates will remain the same for them.

“The actual payoff is no better than for anybody else,” Hinko said.

Greg Henderzahs, executive director for the Center for Lay Ministries in Jeffersonville that services low income residents, said the TARC toll waivers are “huge.”

“Really when you focus in on my clients, the people who are here getting food from the pantry, a big portion don’t even have transportation, and the transportation they use is TARC,” Henderzahs said.

About 55 percent of TARC riders have a median household income of $25,000, according to a 2013 study.

“It wouldn’t have been very good for them to have to pay a dollar or two each way across the river,” Jon Reiter, spokesman for TARC, said.

Reiter said that TARC is thankful the tolls were waived, though he isn’t sure how much or if tolling would have affected bus fare.

“We would have had to make some tough decisions,” he said.