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CHICAGO (CBS) — A suburban trucking company owner reached out to CBS 2 about thousands of dollars in mystery Tollway fees.
He thought a faulty transponder was to blame but turns out it was his system of paying the bills that was a problem.
Morning Insider Lauren Victory has a cautionary tale for anyone with an I-Pass account.
In Elk Grove Village, truck drivers are quite literally cranking it out as they load and unload shipping containers that just arrived from all over the world. Logistic company Benntech’s job is to get the cargo to its next destination. Business is booming.
“Yea it does look empty,” said owner Ned Milic referring to a barely filled warehouse. “But that’s because none of it can fit here anymore.”
Milic is in the process of moving to a bigger facility. For his growing company, time is money and right now Milic’s been spending a lot of time fighting for his money.
“Never-ending. It’s never-ending,” he said, talking about his pile of invoices from the Illinois Tollway.
His trucks missed dozens of tolls in a few short months.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine tolls got missed that day,” he said pointing to his unpaid toll log.
The strange thing is the same I-Pass transponder on the same truck on the same day, March 2, shows it did register and paid three other tolls.
“How can a transponder one minute work and another minute not work? And work on one toll and not work on another toll in a span of a couple hours?” Milic asks.
It’s happened over and over with transponders on two of Milic’s trucks.
“I spoke with them at the Toll Authority [sic], I never really got a solid answer,” he said.
The answer he did get — cough it up. The Tollway wants Milic to pay thousands of dollars in fees he’s racked up for not paying some of those missed tolls on time.
According to a Tollway representative, the “missed tolls” aren’t a transponder issue but a payment problem.
Ever get an email alerting you to a low or negative I-Pass balance? Don’t ignore it.
Milic said he replenishes his I-Pass account every so often but unlike his trucks, apparently, his money wasn’t moving fast enough. His sometimes negative, sometimes low balance was not enough to cover the amount of tolls his trucks were hitting every day.
I-Pass users will start to get invoiced for fees if three or more tolls aren’t paid in a month.
The suggestion from the Tollway: keep your account balance on auto-replenish.
Another good tip — make sure all your I-Pass information is up-to-date.
Source: ChicagoCBS
