Ocracokers and Hyde County officials have been fighting to keep the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry free for several years now as the Republican-controlled General Assembly has mounted one effort after another to place a toll on the route and local legislators and other friendly lawmakers have tried to beat back the attacks.
Now, it would seem, the battle is getting underway on a new front — at the North Carolina Department of Transportation.
For the past week or so, the director, Ed Goodwin, and deputy director, Jed Dixon, have been giving presentations on the dire state of NCDOT’s Ferry Division. The word is that Goodwin has been getting pressure to move ahead and toll the Hatteras-Ocracoke route to raise needed funds to replace the aging ferry fleet.
Perhaps the pressure has been coming from his new boss, DOT Secretary Nick Tennyson, and, for sure, it’s come from Malcolm Fearing of Manteo, who represents Division 1, including Dare and Hyde counties, on the state’s Board of Transportation, which makes the call on such things as tolls.
The Ocracoke Observer reported last week that Hyde County manager Bill Rich told the Ocracoke Civic and Business Association at its Oct. 15 meeting that a request to toll the ferries would be made at this week’s meeting of the Albemarle Regional Planning Organization, which includes Dare and Hyde and eight other counties.
?The bottom line is there is going to be a toll for the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry whether we want it or not because the Ferry Division has to find a way to pay for new and badly needed ferries,? he told the group, according to an article in The Ocracoke Observer.
The Observer reported that Rich also said that he had been in many discussions with members of the RPO (District 1, which includes Ocracoke) who have suggested that Ocracoke get ahead of any General Assembly’s attempts to force a toll on the Hatteras-Ocracoke Ferry by offering a two-fold solution. The solution would include tolling tourist vehicles at $15 per car with Ocracoke residents exempt and a $75 yearly commuter pass that would enable anyone to ride any of the Ocracoke ferries, including those for Swan Quarter and Cedar Island. Currently, that fee is $15 each way.
The news that the ferry might be tolled was understandably not well received on Ocracoke, which is already economically stressed by a drop in ferry ridership caused by long waiting times. And The Observer later reported that Ferry Division director Goodwin said he wouldn’t take the tolling request to the RPO if Hyde County opposed it.
The tolling of ferries was subsequently removed from the agenda for the RPO meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 21, in Manteo.
Meanwhile, the Dare County Board of Commissioners put ferry tolling on the agenda for its meeting on Monday, Oct. 19, in order to give instruction to the board’s representative to the RPO.
At the request of the board, Jed Dixon gave a presentation for the Ferry Division outlining its financial problems.
Here’s the story:
- The Ferry Division is struggling on its Hatteras-Ocracoke route because shoaling in Hatteras Inlet has forced the division to use a longer route. The trip now takes about an hour, rather than 40 minutes. The division is running the same number of ferries, but they make fewer trips, causing a wait that can be up to two or three hours. Ferry ridership has dropped by about 30 percent, which is how much Ocracoke says business is down on the island.
- The division has a feasibility study underway on passenger ferry service to Ocracoke. DOT board member Fearing said that passenger ferry service could start as soon as next fall with a grant of $6.7 million, which would fund a $5 million ferry and part of another, in addition to parking, shelters, a tram system on Ocracoke and other needed infrastructure.
- The division will probably propose buying two 80-passenger ferries that would run from Hatteras village and Ocracoke village, where visitors could board a tram for moving around the village. Though some are skeptical about whether or not visitors would flock to a passenger ferry, consultants say the ferries could accommodate 125,000 passengers a year. That, they say, could add $500,000 in new visitor spending the first year.
- The Ferry Division annual budget of about $40 million a year is for operations and maintenance only — not for new vessels.
- The ferry fleet is aging, and the Division says it will need to replace seven ferries in the next 20 years at a cost of $100 million — or $5 million a year over the 20 years. New ferries cost about $12 to $15 million each. The car ferries on the Hatteras-Ocracoke route have an average age of 20 years.
- Under a complicated new funding formula put in place by Gov. Pat McCrory, the state is divided into 10 regions for dividing up transportation funding. It’s called the Strategic Transportation Investments Plan, and the reason for this, McCrory says, is to put transportation funding decisions in local hands.
- Each region has $32 million with which to fund bridges, trains, airports, roads, bike and pedestrian projects, and ferry replacement. The projects compete against each other, are ranked, and voted on by representatives from the 10 counties.
- Hyde and Dare counties are members of the Albemarle Regional Planning Organization and, along with Currituck, are the only counties with ferries.
- Before McCrory’s new transportation funding plan, money for replacing ferries was provided by an appropriation from the General Assembly.
Obviously, a $15 million ferry would take a huge chunk out of the ARPO’s total transportation funding — about half of it.
And this is why DOT officials are looking at tolling the free Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry, and many members of the General Assembly would like nothing more.
“There is no consistent recurrent revenue source to fund ferry vessel replacement,” Dixon told the Dare Commissioners at their Monday meeting.
“There needs to be a conversation in Raleigh about how we fund our ferry fleet,” DOT board member Fearing told the commissioners.
Wally Overman, who is Dare County’s alternate representative to the RPO, briefly addressed his colleagues on the board and then made a motion to support ferry tolling at the RPO meeting.
“The passenger ferry is a ‘win-win’,” situation,” Overman said.
Much of the discussion at the Dare County BOC meeting was about the passenger ferry and about how great a deal a $75 pass to ride all three ferries to and from Ocracoke would be.
There was little to no discussion about the pros and cons of tolling the vehicle ferry.
Furthermore, Commissioner Allen Burrus, who represents Hatteras Island on the board, was the only member to even question some of the logistics of the passenger ferry — such as where all those people who ride it would park — in addition to all the folks waiting for the car ferry.
Dixon replied that there is a plan for ferry riders to park in a current lot and that other parking areas will be built, but Burrus remained skeptical, and talked about ferry lines that sometimes back up into the heart of Hatteras village and block access to businesses.
“I don’t see where this helps Hatteras village at all,” Burrus said. “We’re the Dare County Commissioners.”
“This isn’t being done to hurt anyone,” Fearing said at one point in the discussion.
In the end, Dare’s commissioners voted 6-1, with Burrus against, in favor of tolling ferries and taking that recommendation to the Albemarle Regional Planning Organization.
?I can?t believe they did that,? Rich told The Ocracoke Observer. ?I thought Dare was with us. That?s not in concert with what?s going on. The RPO members said that if Hyde doesn?t want a toll on the Hatteras Ferry they won?t go along with it.?
Furthermore, Rich noted that Hyde County had supported Dare when a sales tax redistribution plan proposed by the legislature would have had a severe impact on Dare’s revenues. Hyde commissioners voted to support Dare, even though Hyde County would have gained some revenue in the redistribution.
“Based on the information we got, this was a good idea and one we could support,” Bob Woodard, board chairman, said in an e-mail the day after the vote. “The Ferry Division is struggling for money…It’s a small amount to keep the ferry system going.”
“The BOC felt, on the basis of information provided in the meeting by NCDOT and the Ferry Division and other discussions with ferry division management that the tolling program proposed made economic sense for the region so we supported it,” said vice-chairman Wally Overman.
Burrus remained adamant that Dare County “screwed up.”
“It’s not acceptable to make Hatteras village a parking lot for DOT,” he said after the meeting.
The Albemarle Regional Planning Organization did meet on Wednesday and tolling the ferries was indeed not on the agenda. However, there was reportedly a spirited and very long discussion of the issue.
Lloyd Griffin, a county commissioner in Pasquotank County and who is chair of this transportation planning group, told The Ocracoke Observer that the planning group on Wednesday talked about ferries for three hours and decided to again give the General Assembly another chance when it convenes in April for a ?short session.?
He confirmed that the agenda was amended during the meeting when the members voted 6 to 2 to add the resolution to it. The two counties to vote against adding tolling to the agenda were Hyde and Currituck.
However, Griffin said no vote was taken on the resolution to toll the Hatteras Ferry.
?We did not vote on the motion but had a consensus to give legislators the opportunity to correct it,? Griffin said. ?In January, we will talk more.?
The resolution will be on the Jan. 21 meeting agenda as old business, said Angela Welsh, planning director/RPO coordinator of the Albemarle Commission.
However, it’s clear that Ocracokers can’t count on the members of the RPO to stick with them on the tolling issue.
At a meeting on Ocracoke on Monday, state Rep. Paul Tine, who represents Dare and Hyde, said he would try one more time to get the General Assembly to fund ferry replacement. He has announced he will not run for re-election but will continue serving until his term ends.
?We?ll give it one more shot,? Tine said about getting replacement costs out of the RPO?s funding bucket. “If we can?t in the short session, you?ll have to look at something down the road.
?The money is there (in the state budget for ferry replacement),? Tine said. ?The problem is getting the Senate to agree. We need to remove it out of the Division (RPO), or at least put it into the regional pot of money.?
Tine added that the Senate Republican leadership said they would work with him.
In the final analysis, Malcolm Fearing is right when he says that there needs to be a conversation in Raleigh about funding replacement ferries.
The state needs to fund them just as it always has.
The governor’s new plan has done nothing but lob the ferry-toll grenade into the middle of the 10 counties of the RPO group and pit the members against each other. This is neither fair nor productive.
We need to think of the ferry as the road to Ocracoke Island and it should be free, as other roads are.
Furthermore, the free Hatteras-Ocracoke Ferry is a vital part of a thriving tourist industry on the Outer Banks that sends many millions of dollars each year to Raleigh.
The ferry is wildly popular with tourists, and important to the economy of Dare, as well as Hyde County. There are plenty of visitors who stay north of the Bonner Bridge and take the day trip to Ocracoke, passing through and stopping on Hatteras Island.
Dare’s commissioners need to rethink this issue and get behind its neighbors on the coast.
Agreeing to toll the ferries is playing right into the hands of General Assembly, which continues to brag about cutting taxes on businesses and individual incomes, while increasing fees on everything in sight and adding sales tax on service such as getting your car repaired.
I imagine there are some lawmakers in Raleigh who are just tickled pink that the members of the Albemarle Regional Planning Organization are squabbling over ferry tolls and apparently ready to cave in.
Enough is enough. Keep the free ferry free.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry toll may happen sooner rather than later
Tolls on Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry off the table again
The roller coaster of ferry tolls hits a bump in Dare County
Regional Planners to continue ferry toll talk in January
Are passenger-only ferries in our future?
