By Keith M. Phaneuf and Jscqueline Rabe Thomas

A dozen House Democratic legislators pledged today to propose a bill in the upcoming legislative session to establish electronic tolling throughout highways in Connecticut — a pitch that has been made numerous times in recent years but has failed to win approval.

The measure would empower the Department of Transportation to establish tolls, which eventually would become the chief source of revenue for the Special Transportation Fund. The fund’s chief sources of revenue now are fuel taxes.

Proponents of tolls say the investment is necessary to bail out the fund that supports transportation construction projects, and dismissed criticism that the money would just be raided to help cover the state’s operating budget, as has been done in the past.

“I promise you if we do this, this state will thrive,” said state Rep. Tony Guerrera, D-Rocky Hill, the longtime House chair of the legislature’s Transportation Committee.

By Ana Radelat

Washington –  Connecticut residents will still get their mail and Social Security checks, but the shutdown of the federal government will reverberate through state agencies – especially those that are most reliant on federal grants and federal workers — and many in the state would eventually feel an impact.

The Malloy administration said it could not immediately assess the impact of the shutdown that began shortly after midnight Friday, a result of the failure of congressional Republicans and Democrats to come to an agreement on how to keep the federal government running.

But the state Office of Management and Policy sent state agency heads a memo Friday afternoon warning a federal shutdown was imminent.

“Connecticut has made preparations to mitigate the impacts of the Trump shutdown as much as possible,” said Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

By Mark Pazniokas

Southington — Oz Griebel, a petitioning candidate for governor who once led the state Transportation Strategy Board, told an audience of construction executives and union members today that Connecticut must embrace electronic tolling and higher gasoline taxes to preserve and improve its transportation infrastructure.

The transportation session was held in Southington. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) Mark Pazniokas for CTMirror.org

At a transportation forum for Democratic and unaffiliated candidates, Griebel offered the broadest prescription for how to stabilize and grow a special transportation fund now projected to hit insolvency by 2022, leaving the state unable to borrow money to address a growing backlog of transportation needs.

Many of the Democrats, unlike the Republican field at a similar event a month ago, agreed on the need for the revenue that tolling would bring, while they largely dodged the issue of higher gasoline taxes. Both forums were sponsored by the Connecticut Construction Industries Association.

Malloy, who is expected to share his own transportation funding proposals by month’s end, warned last week that hundreds of capital projects worth $4.3 billion would have to be suspended over the next five years without a rapid infusion of new revenue.