Leasing Our State's Toll Roads, Lottery Sounds Desperate

What if that toll road you often drive on business or vacation was privately owned? How about your state lottery being leased by investors from another state? Would tolls skyrocket? Would you trust the integrity of the lottery? All of these things could happen if the state decides to privatize some of its holdings to make big bucks. It sounds like a bad idea.

Gov. Charlie Crist is listening to private investors who want to lease items like the Florida Lottery and toll roads, such as the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, for huge chunks of change. In return for their billions of dollars, they would have the ability to market these things, and possibly raise prices, for decades to come.

With Florida's $1.1 billion budget deficit, state leaders are listening to investors who might pay upward of $31 billion for the lottery system. According to an article in The Tampa Tribune, investors would then get something like a 40-year lease of the proceeds.

An annuity would be set up with a portion of the state windfall to produce the current amount of lottery money used for schools. This year, lottery players pumped about $1.8 billion into the schools. The annuity would guarantee that much every year under this scenario. Of course, this doesn't account for increased costs in future years.

As for certain toll roads, the dollar amount would be in the hundreds of millions, and tolls could raise to keep investors happy. Of course, lease agreements could limit how much tolls could go up and definitely must address proper maintenance of these roads.

According to the Tribune article, besides the Sunshine Skyway toll bridge, other possible toll roads to lease include the Pinellas Bayway, Alligator Alley and the Beachline East Expressway that connects Orlando with Atlantic beaches.

In some countries, leasing toll roads is a fairly common practice. That's not the case in the United States, and plenty of people are leery of being snookered. It's good to be cautious before making such a move, because getting a big sum up front might be attractive in the short term, but long-term residents could get hit hard by a dumb leasing agreement.

Crist said the state is only in the listening stage in considering these leases. That's good to know and it's probably worth listening to what they are saying. In the meantime, though, let's deal with our state budget crisis by cutting expenses until the economy turns around.

This is no time to make a rash decision with dollar signs in our eyes. The stakes are just too high.