04.24.08

This Week’s Transportation Wrap UP

Posted in Around The State, Commentary, Privatization, Road Issues, Taxes, Uncategorized at 12:51 pm by wcnews

Quite a bit happened at yesterday’s Senate Committee on Transportation & Homeland Security hearing. Here’s an excellent wrap up from Terri Hall at Texas Turf, Senate Transportation Committee debates road funding, questions market valuation. Here’s an excerpt:

Also of note, the counties who had representatives before the Committee today singing the praises of the TTC and toll roads all have goodies being granted to them in tomorrow’s Transportation Commissioner Meeting. Quid Pro Quo? Sure looks like it.

That was the most appalling aspect to today’s meeting, overall. Listening to elected officials and bureaucrats alike promote the Trans Texas Corridor, knowing the destruction it’ll bring. Senator Williams said he supported the TTC-69 despite the farmers with pitchforks! The Lufkin Mayor Jack Gorden said the TTC-69 would increase the standard of living in East Texas. Oh really, Sir, how does increasing one’s taxes and stealing one’s land and livelihood increase someone’s standard of living? Then, Bowie County Judge James Carlow welcomed the TTC to his community saying: “we’re ready to give the land right now. Come build it.” It’s not YOUR land to give, Mr. Carlow. What a slap in the face to his constituents. This deplorable behavior is easy to explain however. These officials have been heavily lobbied USING OUR OWN TAXPAYER DOLLARS by registered LOBBYISTS and TxDOT, and no doubt promised the moon to get on board. Just look at the goodies the Commission is doling out at their meeting tomorrow.

Let the taxpayer revolt kick it up a notch. Let these elected officials hear from you with your thoughts on their “representation” of YOU before this committee.

Also I recommend reading her testimony to the committee [.PDF] yesterday, here’s some of that:

We demand fundamental reform in all things transportation and a public vote on ALL toll
projects, including the Trans Texas Corridor. We’re tired of politicians and bureaucrats making multi-billion dollar tax decisions that effect our daily survival and our ability to make a living without our consent. School Boards and municipalities have to come to the voters for approval of bonds, it’s unconscionable that billions of dollars worth of bonds are being sold for toll projects without project by project voter approval.

We demand you clean house at TxDOT and give the taxpayers total transparency on ALL toll viability studies, market value studies, and other vital financial information as soon as they’ve been conducted (not 30 days prior to letting a contract when the deal is done). We don’t need more “educating” and toll road indoctrination. We need to look no further than our own bank accounts to know what needs to be done. Stop pushing the MOST expensive transportation option, which is toll roads, stop raiding and wasting our gas taxes on parks in downtown Dallas or on rest stops with free WiFi, nix the unsustainable toll road plans and put some sanity back into transportation in this State. The taxpayer revolt and drumbeat will only get louder until you do.

Well said. While we don’t need to be educated anymore on tolls, this KXAN report, and the comments, makes clear that many are still in need of education on which is the least expensive way to pay for roads.

Given a choice, residents do not seem too thrilled with the options.

One Austinite said he would rather pay tolls than a gas tax. “Because I choose were I want to go,” he said.

“You’re going to have to use gas more than the toll roads, so tolls,” another Austin resident said.

One person said they did not mind either way. “There’s not much I can do about it, but today I’m catching the bus.”

Texas road needs are so great and the financing hole so deep, there are no easy answers.

“It’s not as simple as saying if we just raised the gas tax we wouldn’t need tolls, or if we have tolls, we don’t have to raise the gas tax,” said Sen. Kirk Watson, vice chairman of the transportation committee. “It’s going to require a combination. Clearly, being more responsible with the gas tax and not diverting funds will make any sort of user fees a whole lot better.”

Sen. Watson may need a little education as well. As long as those toll tools in your tool box come with a vote from the local community. And no, we don’t believe a group of already elected officials, like CAMPO, voting in favor of tolls is accountability, (see comments in this post). A direct vote, yes or no, from those who will have to drive the roads on a regular basis.

Last via Sal, here’s an excerpt of the comments from David Stall, of CorridorWatch.org, on Perry’s speech on Tuesday at the TTF.

Today Governor Perry used the podium at a TxDOT conference to deliver a verbal assault on the Texas Legislature and every citizen of Texas.

We can certainly agree that the last few years have been challenging times at TxDOT. Finally, TxDOT is in the public eye, and the result so far has been a real poke in the eye to anyone looking.

The heat TxDOT receives today is the direct result of the direction they have been forced to take by two powerful men, Governor Rick Perry and his late best friend Ric Williamson. It is their planning, not TxDOT’s, that has people puzzled.

It is their insistence that a projected population growth somehow justifies anything they want to do, anywhere they want to do it, using any financial scheme available.

It’s building roads from where no one lives to where no one works that leaves us puzzled.

No matter how many Aggies you put in Kyle Field you still don’t need a 1/4-mile wide Trans Texas Corridor in Pecos County.

While the gas tax is coming more into the conversation, what this week’s action says is that toll roads, corporate toll roads, privatization, and shady something-for-nothing-schemes, still are at the top of the list in this debate.

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