In today’s AAS with Ben Wear’s misleading headline, Truck relief on I-35? Maybe a little. The big story is not that truck’s aren’t leaving I-35 to drive SH 130, the big news is, which is almost always the case, the consultants T&R (Traffic and Revenue) numbers are not “paying off”.
The study indicates that the 25 percent lower toll would pull an additional 350 trucks a day to Texas 130. But I-35 at U.S. 183 in North Austin had 24,000 trucks a day in 2007. So the lower toll might remove less than 2 percent of I-35 truck traffic.
What isn’t changing on Texas 130, at least not yet: car tolls, for perhaps five years. And the overall financial picture, painted mostly in shades of red.
The 2002 financial prospectus for investors who put $2.2 billion into Texas 130, Loop 1 and Texas 45 North showed initial toll rates unchanged until 2015, when a 50 percent increase was scheduled. Transportation commissioners have the power to raise rates before then, but they aren’t talking publicly about doing so.
But they might be considering it privately. According to figures from TxDOT Chief Financial Officer James Bass, the three-road system has required $68 million in tax money to balance the books over the first three years.
We’re paying tolls and our tax money is going for these roads too. Who doesn’t feel burned yet by the toll road scheme? Tip to ACREblog, SH 130 in the red–taxpayers making up the difference, with this commentary.
So why is it a good idea to continue to build toll roads where taxpayers will be paying the investors? By the way, ground has been broken on the tolled interchange at 290 East and 183—a tolled interchange being paid for by taxpayer stimulus money.
Anyone who still believes toll roads are the answer to our state’s transportation problem can no longer be taken seriously. Seriously.
On Wednesday TxDOT released the Management Organizational Review (MOR) that was performed by Grant Thornton. Here’s the link to the report. If you don’t want to read the whole 628 page report these two paragraphs, from the introduction, sum up TxDOT’s problems pretty well.
Funding Needs
In May 2008, Texas Transportation Commission Chair Deirdre Delisi, “at the request of Texas Governor Rick Perry, appointed a volunteer committee of 12 experienced and respected business leaders designated as the 2030 Committee. The Committee’s charge was to provide an independent, authoritative assessment of the state’s transportation infrastructure and mobility needs from 2009 to 2030.” The 2030 Committee determined that the State requires $315 billion from 2009 through 2030 (or $14.3 billion per year, in 2008 dollars) to meet pavement, bridges, urban mobility, and rural mobility and safety needs. Despite the 2030 Committee’s findings, some members of the transportation community hold differing views on the actual amount of funding required to sustain the State’s transportation system for this period. [Emphasis added].
The lack of agreement on the amount of funding needed to meet Texas transportation requirements leads to a certain amount of discomfort with TxDOT requests for increased funding. In addition, mistrust of TxDOT and issues around the consistency and completeness of communications on this issue inhibits commitment to additional funding. Some stakeholders said that “TxDOT isn’t broken, it’s just broke.” Others said that TxDOT isn’t sufficiently high-functioning to know if it has the resources required to do the job needed. Still others expressed that whether or not TxDOT has enough funding, until the Department is more transparent and has improved its operations, it would be difficult to justify an increase in funding.
That means that state agency tasked with building and maintaining our roads cannot be trusted with the money needed to build and maintain our roads. Essentially everyone knows, although there is no agreement on the exact figure, that TxDOT needs a whole bunch of money in the future to build and maintain Texas’ roads. But few, if any in the legislature trust those in charge at TxDOT to do what’s right in given the money. By in charge I mean Perry and his appointees – a fish rots from the head down – not the employees at TxDOT.
I know I’ve said this many times but it bears repeating. How can anyone trust people who think government is the problem to be able to use government to solve problems? It just boggles the mind how anyone could still believe that that TxDOT can be turned around without a new governor.
TxDOT has a singular, deeply entrenched culture that reflects 93 years of service dedicated to providing top notch transportation infrastructure to the State of Texas. This culture, and the ways in which the organization is led and managed, are fundamental considerations in the MOR as they affect every aspect of TxDOT performance. The unifying thread through all the MOR observations and recommendations is the way in which leadership and management practices and cultural norms affect TxDOT behavior and efficacy. Changes in this area are the essential underpinning to achieving meaningful improvements in the areas of effectiveness, efficiency, communications and transparency.
Significantly change its leadership structure. It recommends that TxDOT create three executive positions that would answer to the executive director — chief administration officer, chief operations officer, and chief financial officer. These jobs would be new — even if, in the case of the CFO, they exist in some form today, and should not be automatically reserved for members of the executive now employed, the audit says.
Lessen its focus on engineering among its top leadership, and indeed throughout the agency. Currently, engineering expertise — even a license — seems to be the only coin of the realm that carries any value. That has meant putting engineers in non-engineering roles, just to keep them aboard, and making it harder for non-engineers “to be heard” no matter how strong their relevant, non-engineering expertise might be.
Make the aides to the five TxDOT commissioners who oversee the agency answer to the commissioners, not to the executive director. The report says that has created a conflict of interest. If the commissioners are to oversee the agency, they deserve unbiased and unfettered advice from their administrative assistants.
Divide the government relations staff and the communications staff. A few years ago, communications folks — spokesman and others — were merged under a new department led by Colby Chase, who had represented the department’s interests in Washington previously. The report says that has helped lead to TxDOT’s image as an overly political entity, and the staff of about 50 full-time workers should be divided once again.
Too little metrics, means it’s hard to assess TxDOT’s work. Is TxDOT doing good work? Efficiently? Who knows, says the audit.
Clearly TxDOT employees are accomplishing a great deal of work. However, in the absence of relevant metrics, performance reporting, management disciplines and controls – deployed across the organization – it isn’t possible to determine whether work is being done effectively or efficiently.
Burka has more as does Kuff who notes that “..State Sen. Kirk Watson and Bill White also weigh in from a more pointedly political perspective”.
There are always unintended consequences of legislative action, and the worse the legislation the worse the unintended consequences are. Mike Krusee’s HB 3588 and the toll roads it has wrought on our area is the case in point. TxDOT literally has no plan, or system in place, about how to collect from drivers who refuse to pay their tolls, Tough road ahead collecting late tolls, other then possibly clogging local Justice courts in Travis and Williamson County.
TXDOT’s Wisconsin-based collection agency is now calling violators at home and sending letters to try and get them to pay their tolls and fees.
But if you ignore the collection agency, there is little they can do. They cannot contact your credit report, they cannot prevent you from renewing your driver’s license and they cannot stop you from registering your vehicle with the state.
Taking violators to court could be TXDOT’s only option to collect the money. But until an Interlocal Agreement is reached, county officials said those cases will not be heard.
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More than 150,000 toll violators owe $56.1 million in outstanding tolls and “administrative fees” – but the Texas Department of Transportation is hitting a roadblock, or several, when it comes to collecting them.
To be exact, the amount of outstanding tolls is $3.12 million. But KXAN discovered TXDOT is charging some violators more than 4000 percent in those “administrative fees”. And those fees are what push the total amount of money owed to $56.1 million.
TXDOT said they’re now going to take those violators to court.
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KXAN spoke with the elected officials in Williamson and Travis counties, and they agree with Gammon.
Travis County Treasurer Delores Ortega Carter said TXDOT needs to get their ducks in a row before they file any toll violation cases.
“They can file all the cases they want, how long they’ll be there we don’t know,” she said.
Carter’s colleague in Williamson County, Treasurer Vivian Wood concurs. “I just can’t see our judge and commissioners agreeing to anything even though the statute is there.”
County officials said it all boils down to what is called an Interlocal Agreement: A set of rules and guidelines to outline procedures dealing with court costs, collection of tolls and fees, where the money collected goes, payment methods, timeliness and line items.
They said there has got to be an Interlocal Agreement before any cases can be heard in county courtrooms. Ortega-Carter and Wood told KXAN they’ve been trying to get an agreement with TXDOT since 2006, but have not heard anything from the state agency.
“I don’t have anything from the state that tells me…and we don’t just send money down to the Comptroller without the state’s requirements for identification of those funds,” Wood said.
Ortega-Carter added: “We need to have a paper trail so that, for auditing purposes, we can see where it’s going. We don’t care how the state spends the money, that’s their problem. We do care how the county receives that money.”
No one wants to pay more for anything, but in transportation it’s becoming more and more clear that there is a cost – in both time and money – to doing nothing. This week, the Funding Subcommittee of the Texas House Select Committee on Transportation Funding heard testimony from Frank Bliss, a commercial real estate developer in the Metroplex, who investigated the cost to taxpayers in increased fuel costs through decreased fuel efficiency when traffic goes from free-flowing to “stop and go.”
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His conclusion: “Without adequate funding for transportation, as growth occurs we pay for the lack of infrastructure by buying more gasoline and having less time for our families, communities, and the businesses we represent. Instead of . . . [paying] to fund new roads, we’re giving it to the gas companies. If we understood the math, I think we might change our attitudes and put the money where it can help us the most.”
Holy crap!! Is that plain enough for everyone to understand!? Would you rather pay taxes to build roads, or but more gas and give it to the oil corporations.
Here’s Burka’s comments on what the engineers had to say:
Rick Perry can say that he hasn’t raised taxes, but tolls are more expensive than gasoline taxes, and they have surged upwards. The rate of toll revenue increase cited above — equivalent to a 1/2 cent per year increase in the gasoline tax (I’m not going to adopt the euphemism of “user fee”) since the last tax increase in 1991 — figures out, over 20 years, to be identical to a 10-cent increase in the gasoline tax. Critics of the gasoline tax have a point, that it has lost a lot of its revenue-raising potential due to greater fuel economy, but raising the tax is still better than stagnancy. We could have built a lot of free roads with a ten-cent increase in the tax. Instead, we have spent this decade fighting over unpopular toll roads and even more unpopular proposals to privatize roads. At any point, Perry could have stepped forward and said that we needed to raise the gasoline tax — or presented the public with a referendum of the two alternatives, toll roads or gasoline taxes. Instead, we took the most costly approach: borrowing. We spent billions of dollars on bonds and hundreds of millions on interest payments. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Or, I should say, politics, politics, politics. [Emphasis added].
I’ll go with greed, greed, greed. Or selfishness, selfishness, selfishness. So glad the “fiscal conservatives” have been running our state government.
Tolls are the most expensive way to pay for roads. But it benefits corporations and allows politicians to use snake oil – in the name of Public Private Partnerships (PPP’s), Comprehensive Development Agreements (CDO’s) to name a few – to tell voters they can have new roads without having their taxes raised. Tolls are just a different name for tax, and a more expensive one at that. Damn, this sounds like a broken record.
CAMPO is still taking public comments on their 25 Year Transportation Plan, comments are being taken online until 5 PM Friday May 14th. All the information including copies of the plan so far can be found HERE.
The new plan includes a much higher percentage of rail and other transit spending than its predecessor and a sharply reduced amount for maintaining highways. In the introduction, the plan claims to embrace a new philosophy of transportation planning based on encouraging dense centers of development rather than continuing suburban sprawl willy-nilly.
But even those working on the plan say the focus on centers — not an emphasis of previous plans — will make little real-world difference. The plan is only as accurate as its assumptions about the future, they said, and making predictions about the next quarter-century is inevitably an exercise in guesswork.
“To borrow a Hemingway phrase, it’s pretty to think we can plan 25 years in advance,” said Hays County Commissioner Jeff Barton , a Democrat who serves on the CAMPO board. “There’s value in the exercise, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves.”
What’s in the plan matters, however, because under federal law a transportation project can’t get federal dollars — almost all highway and transit projects are at least partially funded by the federal government — unless the project is in the long-range plan. But the 19-member CAMPO board, made up mostly of local elected officials from Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop and Caldwell counties, can amend the plan at any time. And there will be another wholesale rewrite five years from now, five years after that, and so on.
And as we see later in the article there are some differences between Travis and Williamson and how they intend to proceed in the future.
The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is asking for the public to cooperate with them in planning the Statewide Long-Range Transportation Plan 2035. It will be finalized in 2011 and will be the blue print for the “multimodal statewide transportation” in Texas for the next 24 years. There will be 26 meetings around the state of Texas, (From El Paso to Beaumont, and from Amarillo to Pharr), May 4th – 16th. (click here for the complete list.)
TxDOT has taken heat, and deservedly so, during it’s undertaking of the Trans-Texas Corridor for not involving the public and affected areas in the planning process. It looks like they’ve learned from that, and good to see that this time they are making a point of involving the public from the beginning. Here area few excerpts fromTxDOT Executive Director Amadeo Saenz words to the people of Texas:
The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is currently updating the long-range, multimodal statewide transportation plan, and I would like to personally invite you to participate in its development.
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The Statewide Long-Range Transportation Plan 2035 is not a listing of projects (although it will include the project listing included in the Unified Transportation Program), but a “blueprint” for the planning process that will guide the collaborative efforts among TxDOT, local and regional decision-makers, and all transportation stakeholders to reach a consensus on needed transportation projects and services. This Plan requires a cooperative process among TxDOT, metropolitan areas, cities, counties, various public and private transportation organizations, and you – the traveling public.
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I encourage you to participate in the planning efforts at both the state and local levels. We want to ensure that your voice is heard, and your ideas and concerns are taken into consideration as decisions are made with regard to your transportation system and the services you depend on for your quality of life. I invite you to provide written comments at an open house-style public meeting, by mail, or on the TxDOT website. Your input is essential to TxDOT’s ability to serve the citizens of and visitors to the State of Texas and to be responsive to your transportation needs.
All of us who complained now owe it to our state and TxDOT to get involved, one way or another, and be heard on the future transportation needs of our state. Get involved or don’t complain in the future. There are many ways to get involved, via the TxDOT web site:
Today, Speaker Joe Straus (San Antonio) announced the formation of the House Select Committee on Transportation Funding to highlight the need for increased transparency and accountability in Texas transportation and to analyze current and future transportation funding requirements.
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The House Select Committee on Transportation Funding will develop transportation proposals for the next legislative session. The committee’s analysis will include a study of ways to increase accountability in transportation planning and a review of the effectiveness and efficiency of current funding options.
(1) focus on the need for increased transparency and accountability in all facets of transportation planning, development, and implementation;
(2) review the current funding options being utilized to determine their effectiveness at meeting future funding demands;
(3) analyze the amount of funding needed to meet future transportation infrastructure and maintenance needs;
(4) assess the dollars per mile spent in construction (considering the state’s varying geographic, environmental, and climate conditions) to determine whether our state is making efficient use of current transportation funding resources;
(5) explore innovative approaches to encourage local government entities to participate in the development of critically needed transportation projects; and
(6) consider the feasibility of using alternative funding options at the state and local levels to meet the expected growth and demand for transportation infrastructure, rail relocation, and high speed rail.
The committee members are:
The Honorable Larry Phillips, Chair
The Honorable Eddie Rodriguez, Vice Chair
The Honorable Roberto Alonzo
The Honorable Bill Callegari
The Honorable Drew Darby
The Honorable Ryan Guillen
The Honorable Patricia Harless
The Honorable Todd Hunter
The Honorable Edmund Kuempel
The Honorable Armando “Mando” Martinez
The Honorable Ruth McClendon
The Honorable Joe Pickett
The Honorable Wayne Smith
The Honorable Senfronia Thompson
The Honorable Vicki Truitt
There were two subcommittees created as well. One on funding and the other on planning and accountability.
Not to sure what this committee will accomplish other than making everyone look like they’re doing something. The best thing that could come out of it would be to have a sane and rational plan for planning and paying for transportation infrastructure in the future ready to go as the the next legislative session begins. We shouldn’t hold our breath.
As the title above suggests everyone has a different opinion of whether or not a given situation is a crisis. Likely depending on the situation and how directly effected they are by a given situation. Over at the DMN’s Transpo Blog they’re a little miffed at the latest poll results regarding transportation in Texas, Texans speak: What transportation crisis?.
Now truth be told, this hurt my feelings a bit: Only 1.6 percent of registered voters said they would base their choice in the primary on transportation. Far more were concerned about immigration and, especially, the state budget.
We also asked whether the anticipated state budget shortfall should be addressed by making cuts in highway spending, cuts in education, or cuts in heath services for the poor — or by raising fees or taxes.
A whopping 41 percent said they’d choose the first option — cuts in highway spending — over any of the others. The next favored option? Twenty percent said to raise taxes or fees.
The crisis term is used most often by those who want to use privatization schemes, in this case corporate toll roads. See EOW’s post from earlier in the year about former Bush Transpiration Secretary, and corporate toll lobbyist, Mary Peters, If it’s a crisis then let’s fix it. It’s long been the method of those who would rather have corporations profit from what the government can do much cheaper for the taxpayer, i.e. build roads, to need a crisis to implement their privatization schemes, (see this too). Read the rest of this entry �
Ben Wear has the story, Toll road agency lawyer resigns after bar suspension. Land deal gone bad apparently. The most illuminating thing about the CTRMA in the story is the vetting process for their high ranking employees.
Mobility authority Executive Director Mike Heiligenstein, whose friendship with Nielson goes back two decades to when their children played youth sports together, said he knew nothing about the disputed land deal between Nielson and Wilson.
“It was never brought up during his employment, or before that during the interview process,” Heiligenstein said. “He obviously thought it had been worked out.”
In 2005 Texas Comptroller released a scathing report on the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority (CTRMA), A Need For A Higher Standard, some of which was summarized in the AusChron at the time.
…the Regional Mobility Authority, appointed by regional county commissioners with the approval of the Texas Transportation Commission – the first of several planned RMAs around the state – is an ill-conceived and -executed agency, marked by organizational deficiencies, inadequate accountability to voters, and insufficient safeguards against corruption. Moreover, Strayhorn’s audit found what the report describes as sloppy management practices, apparent “favoritism and self-enrichment” in the appointments to the RMA, excessive budgeting for marketing, and instances of lax expenditure controls (e.g., sloppy handling of expense accounts).
Nevertheless, Greenville’s Bob Deuell told members of our editorial board this week that he would support a one-time boost of 10 cents a gallon in the motor fuels tax — the same increase that Republican John Carona of Dallas has called for.
Deuell has shown in the past that he can be more reasonable than some in his party. We’re still not there yet, but we’re getting closer to the where enough elected politicians will finally recognize, what many of us have known for a while - that an increase, and indexing of the gas tax is the best way to pay for roads in Texas. It’s a tough sell but not impossible, and a skilled politician can support it and get elected. And as long as it done in a way that tax payers are assured the money is going for roads, it is politically feasible.