I know someone who bought a car and got a NEW plate from the BMV. A few weeks later, he got a toll payment demand from a state he had never driven in for a date a week before he bought the car. They had a photo of his plate number.
One thing was missing from the photo: his trailer hitch, which was already on the car when he bought it. And the plate space on the car looked different from his.
We figured it out. It was last year’s plate that hadn’t expired yet. The photo was not clear enough to show the expiration date (which was in tiny print on a sticker on the plate).
Whenever the state is issuing new plates (instead of new stickers), it is possible for two people to have the same plate number. - one new, one old
In Indiana, the plate stays with the person it was issued to. It does not transfer to the new owner when the car is sold. The new owner must get a new plate or use one from a car he already sold. I still have one from a car I sold because it is still valid for me (if I buy another car and pay the registration). I have two plates because I got the new car a month before I sold the old one.
With unionized workers, when you eliminate their jobs, the cost does not magically disappear. They will be paying those displaced workers for years to come in the form of severance and early retirement benefits…
It depends how the contract is written. Often times exempt employees get severance pay. How does that compare to what looks like severance for union workers?
About 6 years ago I got a bill from driving a toll section of the 401 in Canada. My license plate was scanned, Canada found my address and sent me a bill for the use of the road. No toll booth but I did see a sign.
So if Canada can get my registration info from Ohio, any state can likely access your data.
The toll workers outnumber the management positions eliminated by order of magnitude. Toll workers are not exempt positions. Regardless, they had extraordinary benefits and pay compared to non-government run companies.
Severance is a bolus payment so that is way above normal pay per week. Running in red already, how do you raise cash necessary? Plus they had to pay to remove the infrastructure and restore the roadway back to normal. That’s not cheap either. They need cash to offset all of this expense. Rates go up. When rates are going up to pay for new stuff and you’re already deep in debt, you take that opportunity to raise them enough to right the ship. Still probably not enough to counter the bloat…
I haven’t seen the contract. I’m not saying you are wrong, I just don’t know about that particular situation.
Governments aren’t run like businesses. They have different goals and different constituencies. You may wish that governments were run like businesses, but I don’t think that will happen. I’d guess that even a worker-unfriendly state like Texas is more generous with their employees than a typical business operation in Texas.
Indiana’s legislators wouldn’t raise taxes to pay for highways or raise the tolls on the toll road, so they leased it to a private firm for 75 years. When the firm went bankrupt the state was left with the expense all the taxpayers’. If the toll road were a private business, it’d just close down and there’d be no more toll road - but the legislators can’t do that either.
I can’t figure out how it costs less to make people stop to pay a toll to a guy standing in a booth instead of letting drivers go straight through without stopping, something like a ‘free way’!! Wouldn’t that be a great idea! Highways that anyone can use for no charge (except fuel taxes). Would I get a Nobel Prize or something for that invention?
With unionized workers the provisions of a contract apply. If the state doesn’t want to pay severance, etc, it doesn’t allow it in the contract. Unions have no super-powers.
Remember firemen, the guys who shoveled the coal into a steam train’s engine? They got to keep their jobs after the trains switched to diesel because that was the contract. We made great fun of it 50-60 years ago, especially when most of American’s RR firms failed and the government set up Amtrak (for people) and Conrail (for cargo). For all the fun we have made of Amtrak, Conrail was a success, American cargo trains are the envy of the rest of the world, Conrail went private in 1999.
What? They have tremendous leverage! Especially when it’s a government controlled enterprise. They caved in for years to just about any demand even though the revenues continued to decline and the whole thing was essentially insolvent. Yet the benefits and pay continued to increase…
Regardless, that is really not relevant to the discussion in context. The question being addressed is why did the toll cost go UP when they eliminated toll workers. They DID have severance in the contract and they ARE still paying them.
That old cartoon comes to mind. “George you’re being replaced to save money by a computer, a programmer, an IT repairman, an analyst, and two managers”. Not to mention the guys that have to service the readers up in the air.
I’ve been around unions all my life on both sides and its hard to make any general statements. As a non union student worker I was told I needed to walk out with everyone else as they tried to get a 10 cent an hour increase. Luckily it didn’t come to a strike so I just kept on getting paid 10 cents less. I had a union boss remind me that he carried a gun. It really depends on how management deals with them and what kind of leadership the union has. Folks like the teamsters are the worst of the worst and paying an auto worker $70 K a year to install headliners seems a little excessive. But back in the old days labor would be up a creek without a union. So good and bad.