Flush with cash from I-PASS users, the Illinois Toll Highway Authority on Friday super-sized its already ambitious plan to rehabilitate virtually all of its 274-mile system in the next 10 years, boosting its road spending by nearly $1 billion.
Tollway officials announced almost $755 million in new projects — including funds for the long-sought interchange between the Tri-State Tollway (Interstate Highway 294) and Interstate Highway 57, thought to be one of the few places in the country where two interstates cross without connecting.
Expansion of the tollway’s Congestion Relief Program, from $5.3 billion to $6.2 billion worth of work, comes at a time when state legislators and Gov. Rod Blagojevich are grappling for ways to raise money for mass transit, roads, schools and health care.
But the toll highway authority is a quasi-independent entity and operates on its own revenue. This year, it expects to take in $636 million, mainly from tolls.
The toll authority board also announced Friday its decision to name the Northwest Tollway (Interstate Highway 90) in honor of Nobel Prize-winner Jane Addams, the founder of Chicago’s Hull House.
The Jane Addams Memorial Tollway will extend from the Tri-State Tollway to Rockford, where Addams graduated from Rockford Female Seminary before moving to Chicago to found her famed Hull House.
The Illinois Department of Transportation has not yet identified funding for the proposed I-294/I-57 interchange, said department spokesman Mike Claffey. However, State Rep. Robert Rita (D-Blue Island) said $16 million in design and land acquisition funds have been included in the state’s fiscal 2008 budget.
The interchange has been championed by local communities as providing a spark to the area’s economic development and being a way to ease the traffic on local roads now used to go from one interstate to the other.
The first three years of Congestion Relief Program projects, including Open Road Tolling, have been completed on budget, officials said.
About half the funding for the tollway’s projects comes from bond sales guaranteed by toll revenues. The tollway’s bond rating is excellent, spokeswoman Joelle McGinnis said, and its operating revenues have grown from $381 million in 2002 to an estimated $607 million in 2006.
David Schulz, head of the Infrastructure Institute at Northwestern University, said the tollway system can afford to take on billions of dollars’ worth of new projects.
“They’ve got bondholders and credit rating agencies watching them like a hawk,” Schulz said.
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rwronski@tribune.com
