10.06.09

How many times will the TTC die?

Posted in Around The State, Bad Government Republicans, Commentary, Privatization, Road Issues, Transportation at 3:37 pm by wcnews

The Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) is like Jason from the Friday the 13th saga, it’s been killed, or pronounced dead, so many times we’ve lost count. And today’s it has been declared dead again, TxDOT: I-35 toll twin officially dead.

The tollroad twin to Interstate 35, once the centerpiece of Gov. Rick Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor plan, is officially dead, the Texas Department of Transportation announced today.

The department, which has spent years on a huge environmental study of the corridor from Dallas to San Antonio, will officially recommend to the Federal Highway Adminsitration that no action be taken on the road.

[…]

In January, TxDOT killed the Trans-Texas Corridor name and concept, but the only two projects from it lived on: the I-35 twin and the I-69, which would be a tollway from the Rio Grande Valley to Texarkana.

Officials said that project, which unlike the I-35 plan would mainly involve expanding existing highways, remains alive.

But the I-35 plan, given the lack of support legislatively and in rural Texas, was no longer politically viable, a TxDOT official said. That was underscored by an announcement this week that the Texas Farm Bureau, which for several years has opposed the Trans-Texas Corridor plan because it would require acquiring considerable farmland, is endorsing U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Perry’s opponent in the March gubernatorial primary. The group, despite opposing the corridor plan, had endorsed Perry in the 2006 campaign.

Today’s action, which officials say was in process well before the farm bureau announcement, will have no effect on that group’s decision, a spokesman said.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but those statutes are still on the books,” said Gene Hall of the Farm Bureau, referring to law authorizing the Trans-Texas Corridor. The group will stick with Hutchison, he said.

In essence the TTC has been politically unfeasible, aka dead, for quite some time. Essentially the TTC will be dead as long as the political will is not there. Just like, in the same sense, raising the gas tax has been dead since 1992.

Which brings us to the problem that brought about the TTC all those years ago. In Gov. Perry’s, along with the rest of the Texas GOP’s, unwillingness to raise the gas tax to pay for roads, they tried to put one past the people of Texas. It didn’t work. Now it’s damn near ten years later and we’re still in the same, or likely a worse, transportation rut.

The problem from the beginning with the TTC was not that it was an ambitious plan for transportation. The problem was that it was a secret plan, devised by the governor, TxDOT, and corporations, without the input of Texans, and then forced upon us. It was a text book case of how government should not be done.

We still need roads in Texas, and they will have to be paid for. Now that TxDOT has “officially” killed the TTC, all we can do is wait for the new plan. Let’s hope they’ve learned from this mistake and they’ll ask us what we want this time.

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