The Oklahoma Turnpike Authority is responding to a new report revealing the agency’s debt could triple under a turnpike expansion plan.
The report, issued by the Oklahoma Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT), shows OTA is currently $3 billion in debt, but that amount could triple due to current projects.
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The LOFT report says the ACCESS Oklahoma project could bring the total to $10 billion.
News 9 spoke to OTA Executive Director Joe Echelle to learn how the agency is responding.
When you hear those numbers, it’s almost staggering. Is this debt sustainable?
Ladder: It’s a lot of money, no doubt. The number one thing that everybody in Oklahoma needs to know is that this is not the debt of the state. This debt is of the Turnpike Authority. We have the model of investing a significant amount of money into infrastructure in our state, and the way we do that is we sell bonds, take that money, and invest it into road infrastructure — building the turnpikes that you’re all aware of — and then we collect tolls off those turnpikes to make that debt payment. We’ve made that payment every year without being late for more than 70 years in a row. We have a great business model. The main thing that we want to tell everybody is that over the course of the next 10, 11, 12 years, while we’re building out Access Oklahoma, we are investing $8.2 billion in Oklahoma. This is money that is currently in investors’ pockets someplace. They’re going to purchase those bonds from us on the open market. They’re often traded on the open market, but once that money comes into our state, we invest it in infrastructure. It really has been a great way for us to offset the gas tax. If you wanted to make up the amount of money that the Turnpike Authority brings into our state — $250 million from out-of-state drivers, $250 million from in-state drivers — if you wanted to make that money up, you’d need to charge about 40 more cents a gallon for gasoline and diesel in the form of an additional tax just on Oklahomans in order to fund this infrastructure. So what’s important to us is to make sure and highlight that we have a really nice piece of infrastructure that’s being paid for, half of it, by out-of-state drivers.
In the LOFT report, there was a recommendation made to state lawmakers to take a look at any unbuilt projects and see if they still meet state needs. Are you concerned that they could pull the plug on Access Oklahoma?
Ladder: So the Access program — we’ve sold bonds, you know, that’s been validated by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, and basically the program is moving forward. In order to stop it, you have to file an injunction on a project or something, and that’s very costly — it’s unlikely. What you’re referring to in the report is future turnpikes that are maybe redundant to the state’s tax-supported infrastructure system. So maybe ODOT has already built a project that serves that need. The Turnpike Authority is not going to build a parallel road to something that’s already serving the existing need. When those were added in statute, maybe it was a two-lane dirt road, or maybe it was gravel at the time. In a lot of those cases, ODOT’s already made that significant investment, and we’re not gonna do anything that’s redundant to that. We’ve worked with lawmakers over the course of the last couple of years on some legislation, it hasn’t been passed yet, but we’ll be doing that again this coming legislative session to try to clean up the turnpikes that are outlined in statute.
What’s the message you want to leave with Oklahomans this morning?
Scale: The Turnpike Authority is a state agency like any other state agency, and we’re really trying to do the best we can. We have about 500 employees. When you call PikePass to open a PikePass account, you’re talking to an Oklahoman, somebody who lives here in our state, is familiar with the struggles that everybody has with cost of living here. You know what we’re trying to do is provide something that is safe, reliable, and provide some travel time reliability, so that you know when you’re driving between Oklahoma City and Tulsa, that it’s going to take an hour and forty minutes and it’s not going to be different than that.
