08.13.07
A Corporate Toll Road Is A Corporate Toll Road
No matter what Ric Williamson and the corporations that toll want to call it - this time it’s availability payments - it’s still selling out our infrastructure to a private corporation so that they can profit off of the neglect of the last 35 years. Ben Wear at the AAS tells us all about it, ‘Availability payments’ are TxDOT’s newest idea for bringing the private sector into the toll road game.
Availability payments — you gotta love the perfect bureaucratic inscrutability of that name — are an attempt to split the difference between government-run tollways and the privately financed and operated toll roads that had the public and Legislature steamed up earlier this year. In theory, it would be a best-of-both-worlds thing, tapping the private investment sector’s purportedly bounteous piggy bank while leaving full ownership and operation of tollways in public hands.
In theory, this would stand in contrast to concessions. With those, a private entity (like Cintra-Zachry, which is building the next 40 miles of the Texas 130 tollway) gets a long-term lease from the government to finance, build and operate a tollway, including the right to set the tolls (within contractual limitations). Concessions can be accompanied by upfront payments to the government, money that can be used for other transportation projects.
The Legislature said it didn’t like concessions and put a two-year moratorium on them, although the promise of those upfront payments and quickly getting critically needed roads built moved lawmakers to allow about a dozen exceptions across the state.
How would availability payments work? The private entity (probably some sort of consortium) would use its own money to design, build and maybe even maintain the road. In return, its contract with the state or a local toll authority might guarantee minimum and maximum payments.
The size of those periodic payments would be based on how well the toll road performs, fluctuating based on the money “available.” Thus, the name.
They can play semantic games all they want but it’s still a duck.