Snafu fixed; passage requires fee

Tolls began being collected on Monday for the new Louisiana Hwy. 1 bridge at Leeville over Bayou Lafourche for vehicles heading south toward Grand Isle, said LA 1 Coalition Executive Director Henri Boulet at a Bayou Industrial Group meeting in Thibodaux earlier this week.

The bridge does not have a toll booth, a first for the state. A gantry at the entrance reads a sticker and deducts the fee electronically from a prepaid GeauxPass account.

One-time passes can be bought online at www.geauxpass.com or at the Customer Service Center in Golden Meadow.

The gantry scans the vehicle’s license plate.

The cost to cross is $2.50 per passenger car and $5 for trucks.

“The state looked at other toll rates around the U.S.,” Boulet said. Tolls will be collected for the next 31 years to pay off the $166 million construction cost. Of the total, $136 million will be paid through tolling.

Toll roads may also be built in Lafayette and Baton Rouge to deal with the high construction costs, he said.

Discussions about the tolls to use the Leeville bridge were held at two well-publicized public meetings in May 2004 in Larose and Golden Meadow.

“They had a broad range of support for tolling,” Boulet said.

Grand Isle residents will pay 50 cents to use the Leeville bridge. The fee is guaranteed in perpetuity through a May 2009 agreement with the state.

The GeauxPass stickers read by the gantry transponder cost $12.50. A plastic hard case is $32.

Once funds in the GeauxPass account run below $10, the account can be replenished automatically. Four prepay kiosks will be located in Lafourche before vehicles enter the bridge.

Two kiosks will be in Port Fourchon and Grand Isle for vehicles that did not pay a toll. Bridge users have two days to pay before a fine is assessed.

Boulet said the need for the bridge and a new Louisiana Hwy. 1 were identified by the state in 1999. In 2001, the LA 1 project was studied by the Louisiana Transportation Authority among other projects around the state.

But a big boost came in Nov. 2001 when Congress declared Louisiana Hwy. 1 a high priority corridor, Boulet said.

He said many truckers have complained about the bridge’s sharp angles, but the state is moving some railings to accommodate the vehicles.

Tolls had originally opened on July 27, but a computer glitch caused collection to be delayed a week.

Lauren Lee, spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation and Development, said the department does not know how the revenue that was lost would be recovered.

She said 8,000 vehicles a day have been using the new bridge since it opened July 7.