SOUTHERN INDIANA — Kelleigh Munn loves living in Jeffersonville with her fiance Eric Barnett and their 2-year-old daughter Vivienne.
“We moved over here to be closer to family, and it’s just quieter over here,” Munn said.
But she and Barnett have a problem. They both commute to Louisville. Soon, that could cost the couple $160 a month.
With tolls starting at the end of this week, the 35 percent of Clark County employed residents who commute to Louisville for work are bracing for the extra expense.
And while tolls may only reflect a small percent of overall incomes, residents such as Munn say they will feel the impact. Her budget, which includes $125 a week daycare expenses, isn’t that large to begin with, she said.
Tolls, collected by an all-electronic system called RiverLink, will fund the $2.3 billion Ohio River Bridges Project that created two new bridges and rehabilitated an existing one. Users can register a prepaid account and place transponders on their windshields that will automatically charge tolls.
The monthly cost of tolls will vary for each person, dependent on how many times they cross over one of the three tolled bridges. Frequent commuters who can manage to cross 40 times in one calendar month — a one-way trip each week day for four weeks — will receive a $1 per trip discount.
This means that some can plan to budget $40 a month for tolls. If making all 40 trips in a month isn’t doable, costs can range from $2 to $78 a month for passenger vehicles. For families who have more than one frequent commuter, they could be facing $80 or more per month. These costs only apply for residents who have a transponder.
A commuter who receives the discount every month, no less or no more, will spend $480 a year on tolls. With Southern Indiana’s per capita income at $44,773, that accounts for less than 1 percent of annual spending for the average resident.
But $40 a month could mean sacrificing a gym membership, cutting back on coffee shop stops or buying off-brand groceries.
Uric Dufrene, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs and finance professor for Indiana University Southeast, said residents will need to make decisions about how to handle the cost of tolls based on their individual circumstances.
Munn is in talks with her employer to start working from home part time or even full time, but she’s also considering taking the Clark Memorial Bridge to her office. That bridge, along with the Sherman Minton, will remain untolled. The Kennedy, Lincoln, and Lewis and Clark bridges will have tolls.
“There, I think consumers or individual households can balance the cost of the tolls versus the benefits of time and distance,” Dufrene said.
A study conducted in 2013 showed that while tolls will increase the average costs of trips, the total will be less than the cost of tolls themselves when savings on gasoline and time spent sitting in traffic are factored in.
But the study also found that people living in low-income areas, defined by one-person households with less than $10,830 in annual income in 2010, will bear a disproportionately high effect of tolls.
Phil Ellis, executive director of Community Action of Southern Indiana, hears from the low-income residents served by the nonprofit organization that tolls will hit them hard. CASI provides assistance to people for costs like utilities, but they won’t be able to help with tolls since no federal program provides funding for this cost.
“They’re going to have to sacrifice something in order to pay that toll,” Ellis said. “That might be a decrease in groceries, that could be not being able to pay their full utility bills ... Something’s going to be left unpaid, to be honest with you.”
Somewhere between $40 and $80 a month may not seem significant when weighed against the overall economic impact on the region in the years to come.
“But for the immediate need of individuals with low income, they’ll be the last to benefit from any type of economic boom or anything of that nature, because most of them don’t have the education or skills to be eligible or qualified to have one of those [new] jobs ...
“You’re talking a person where $80 could feed them for a week, could feed their family for a week,” Ellis said. “That’s major.”
To mitigate the effects on low income populations, state officials agreed to make TARC buses exempt from tolling to keep bus fare from skyrocketing. Local RiverLink transponders are also free to all users with an account.
“The states took that seriously, and that’s why they worked hard to set a passenger vehicle rate that was as low as they possibly could, and one of the lowest in the nation,” RiverLink spokesman Chad Carlton said of low-income mitigation responses.
He also emphasized the availability of the two untolled bridges.
“The important thing is the system was designed to give people choices,” Carlton said.
It’s not just income levels that drive who will feel the effects of tolls.
A study conducted by local economics professors determined Indiana commuters will pay a much larger chunk of tolls than Kentucky residents.
With 17,000 Southern Indiana residents expected to cross a tolled bridge each day to Kentucky — the study predicted that group will be mostly Clark and Scott County residents — Hoosiers will pay $8.6 million in tolls annually. That compares to 7,000 Kentucky commuters traveling a tolled bridge, totaling $3.6 million in tolls every year.
That makes sense, Dufrene says, because the Louisville metro area has more jobs than Southern Indiana — and higher wages.
While the average wage of jobs in Southern Indiana is in the upper $30,000 range, Hoosier residents make somewhere in the $40,000 range.
“So that means people are crossing the river for jobs that are paying more,” Dufrene said. “So I think if tolls do impact budgets, then people will make a decision if it’s economical to keep traveling across the river to jobs that pay more. If not, they will decide to seek employment closer to home.”
Despite tolls, the bridges will open up more job opportunities in Southern Indiana in the years to come, he said. While Indiana residents may bear more in tolls than Kentucky residents, that share may even out as time goes on, Dufrene said.
“If we want to grow the jobs in Southern Indiana — and we do ... we have to attract a labor force from Louisville and surrounding counties,” he said. “The bridges, of course, will make Southern Indiana more accessible to workers living in Kentucky.”
More jobs in Southern Indiana means fewer residents over time will have to commute to Kentucky, meaning they can avoid the tolls on a regular basis.
Overall, he believes the benefits of the bridges will “far exceed the cost of tolls for Southern Indiana households.”
“I think over the next couple years or so after we get through the opening and initial shock of the tolls, that tolls are going to receive very little discussion in that the economic benefits that we will be seeing will become the focus of the discussion,” Dufrene said.
Sellersburg resident Amy Williams is one frequent commuter who isn’t sweating the tolls.
Williams, who lives with her husband and 2-year-old son and works in Louisville, said her travel time to work has been cut in half or more since the completion of the bridges project. She travels Interstate 65 to get to work, taking the Kennedy Bridge on the way to work and the new Lincoln Bridge on the way home.
“I was very much in the habit of, I pull up Google Maps before I leave the house for anything just to see if I need to go to the Sherman Minton [bridge] or go down Second Street,” Williams said. “ ... Now, it’s amazing. I have not hit traffic since the bridges have been open, knock on wood. I am 15 minutes each way, usually at most.”
Tolls will only cut into her discretionary spending budget, so she doesn’t expect she’ll have to sacrifice any essentials.
“It’s well worth making that work to not sit in numerous hours of traffic each month,” she said.
— Staff Reporter Danielle Grady contributed to this story.