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Some big companies want to make some Tennessee roads their roads to riches.

And one company is using some inside connections to the most powerful people in state government.

Because of loopholes in the state’s ethics laws, what these companies are doing is entirely legal.

But if they get their way, you could still end up paying the price.

Imagine you had to pay just to drive down a road — a road that instead of belonging to everyone — just might belong to a private company.

“After going to all these conferences, I am sold on it,” House Transportation Committee chairman Phillip Pinion, D-Union City, told his colleagues just last week.

It’s an idea that Pinion is aggressively pushing as a way to allow companies to build new roads without lawmakers having to raise gas taxes.

“This would be money that would come in from private dollars. and they would lease it and pay the state ‘X’ number of dollars per year,” Pinion told NewsChannel 5 chief investigative reporter Phil Williams.

Among those pushing for privately operated toll roads is a Capitol Hill lobbyist with close ties to both Pinion and Transportation Commissioner Gerald Nicely.

“She was the chief of staff here at TDOT,” Nicely says.

For more than three years, Velma Jones was Nicely’s top assistant.

But last March, she left state government and went to work as a lobbyist for a giant engineering firm, CTE-AECOM, reporting that she planned to lobby on “notices issued by the Tennessee Department of Transportation.”

In other words, Nicely says, “I would assume it would be state contracts and possibly a lot of other stuff.”

Stuff like tolls roads.

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