Truth Be Tolled

Public premiere

Thursday February 7, 2008
Meet Cast & Crew 6pm
Screening 7pm
Palladium Theater
17910 West IH-10
San Antonio, Texas

For more information:

www.truthbetolled.com

Please RSVP or contact us:

info@truthbetolled.com

Hank Gilbert gives THEM hell

To a packed house of more than 800 people at a TTC-69 town hall meeting, Commissioner Ted Houghton admits to TxDOT's hiring of lobbyists to sell the road project

'Hell to pay'

"This is the governor's program. If we go in and try to scrap some piece of his program, I think we're going to have hell to pay with our boss, and that's the governor. He was elected by the citizens, not us. We are an extension of what he believes."

--Transportation Commission member Ted Houghton of El Paso, quoted by Peggy Fikac in Toll road agency looking to future regarding changes that will or won't be made in the Governor's support of toll roads and public-private partnerships

How it happened

"We got the pass-through toll concept from Europe. They do it slightly differently, and we just took it and changed it to put a Texas twist on it. But I would have to say that the rest of it is homegrown. When it started out, we hired a group of professionals, we sent them to Europe to visit all the big public-private partnership companies there. We sent them all across the United States to visit what little privatization was going on here. Paid for by the state—we wouldn't let the industry pay for it. We hired what we think is the best lawyer in the nation—the Nossaman firm out of California—to represent us. We hired what we thought were the best financial advisors; we got all of them away from the private sector first. The legislature let us put them on contract at a high enough rate to keep them with us, and then they helped us build our body of law and our whole approach to the problem.

In effect, the governor decided to put his print on this and make it a priority for him, lobbying the legislature with us. He empowered us to do this exactly right from the start. Even with the retrenchment of the last session—that was to have been expected. You can't go as far, as fast, and as hard as we did without having some pushback from some of your citizens and from some of your policymakers. What we went though was entirely understandable and entirely expected. And it really is good for the system—it washes out the anger and lets it get to the side of the road, so to speak, where you can move on down the road. But I would say it's mostly homegrown".

--Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson, in Reflections of a Texas Transportation Trailblazer, an interview conducted by Leonard C. Gilroy of the Reason Foundation in September of last year, a few months before Williamson's untimely death

Trans-Texas Corridor public meetings to begin again

Activists Terri Hall and Sal Costello, who both appear in Truth Be Tolled, add to this national news story on the TTC

By Michael Graczyk

From Business Week and Associated Press

The biggest construction project ever attempted in Texas comes under public debate beginning Tuesday in the first of a series of town hall meetings about a proposed 4,000-mile network of superhighway toll roads.

The Trans-Texas Corridor, or TTC, as it has become known, was initiated six years ago by Gov. Rick Perry. It has rankled opponents who characterize it as the largest government grab of private property in the state's history and an unneeded and improper expansion of toll roads.

Texas Department of Transportation officials and Perry have defended the project as necessary to address future traffic concerns in one of the nation's fastest-growing states. They also say the project is vital because of insufficient road revenues from the state gas tax and the federal government.

"This state has to look outside the box and the traditional ways we've been doing things the last 50 years," Perry spokesman Robert Black said.

The TTC would crisscross the state -- for the most part roughly paralleling existing interstate highways -- with up to quarter-mile-wide ribbons of separate highways for cars and trucks, rail lines, pipelines and utility lines. The cost of the project has been estimated at approaching $200 billion, and it could take as long as 50 years to complete.

In what the agency says is an unprecedented step, department officials were heading to Texarkana on Tuesday in northeast Texas for the first of 11 meetings over the next four weeks to answer questions about the project.

Backers of the TTC already have been accused of backroom political dealing, mounting a propaganda campaign and caving to foreign ownership.

"We really are getting ripped off," says Terri Hall, of San Antonio, who heads TURF -- Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom. The group is suing the transportation agency, alleging its promotional campaign violates a ban on state officials using their authority for political purposes.

"Once people really understand all that's going on, and what's at stake, it really does have massive, massive implications," she said.

The first phase of the TTC, envisioned as part of a superhighway stretching from Oklahoma to Mexico, was planned by the Cintra Zachry consortium. It's composed of Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte SA of Spain, one of the world's largest developers of toll roads, and Zachry Construction Co. of San Antonio.

Its legal representative is the firm of Bracewell & Giuliani, the home firm of GOP presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who counts Perry among his supporters.

The Spain-based company would get to operate the roads and collect tolls. State officials insist the land and road would continue to be owned by the state like any Texas road. They also say they have an obligation to make the best deal possible for financing regardless of the address of the contractor.

Hall argues elected officials in the counties affected by the project have "sold out to the road lobby" and succumbed to courting.

And Sal Costello, whose Austin-based Texas Toll Party has been opposing the TTC, speculated transportation officials should expect a cool reception at the meetings, which he said he won't attend.

"These meetings will change nothing," he said.

Some 580,000 acres will be needed for the project, primarily in rural areas that will take "some of the best farmland in the state," says Texas Farm Bureau spokesman Gene Hall.

"The fact of the matter is, every highway in the state of Texas was once private property somewhere," Black said. He noted there was opposition in the 1950s to the vast Texas farm and ranch road system and the interstates of the 1960s.

"A thousand new people are coming to the state every day," he said. "Our population will double in roughly the next 40 years. Our current transportation infrastructure cannot meet that challenge."

Other meetings this week were planned in East Texas for Carthage and Lufkin, both areas in the path of the long-anticipated Interstate 69, one of the proposed legs of the TTC. It would run from the Mexico border in far South Texas, skirt the Houston area and into East Texas toward northwestern Louisiana.

Besides I-69, the Trans-Texas Corridor as proposed also would include new superhighways that parallel existing Interstates 35 and 37, major north-south routes through the center of the state, and I-10, the 800-mile main east-west artery from Orange to El Paso.

An environmental study for the I-69 project undergoes a separate scrutiny at public hearings starting next month. The series starting this week is designed to focus more on the overall TTC project.

'Eyes on TxDOT'

Terri Hall has TxDOT’s dream of toll roads in her sights

By Peter Gorman

From Fort Worth Weekly

It’s looking like a tough year for toll roads in Texas, and no one could be happier about that than Terri Hall, the San Antonio woman whose group is leading the grassroots fight against the controversial pay-to-drive roads that Gov. Rick Perry and others want to see crisscrossing the state.

In September, Hall and her group, Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom (TURF), filed suit in the state district court in Austin against the Texas Department of Transportation, alleging that TxDOT has broken the law by using public funds to lobby legislators for laws favoring toll roads. TURF and Hall also allege that the department’s Keep Texas Moving campaign illegally uses taxpayer money for political advocacy. The judge has refused the state’s request to toss the suit out, and TURF has now gone beyond the civil case and made a formal request that Austin prosecutors consider criminal charges against agency officials.

It didn’t help the state’s case when Hall was named San Antonioan of the year by Clear Channel radio station WOAI and “political person” of the year by the well-respected political blog, The Walker Report. “The honor is great, but it really belongs to the people of Texas who are standing up to toll roads,” Hall told Fort Worth Weekly.

The most serious blow to toll roads, however, may have been the late-December death of Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson, Gov. Perry’s point man on the huge Trans-Texas Corridor project and the most vocal toll road promoter in the state.

The suit brought by Hall and TURF against two top officials of TxDOT seeks to prevent the agency from spending any more taxpayer money on either lobbying legislators or political advocacy. “Both of those are illegal under the Texas Government Code,” Hall said, “and yet both are being done. So we’ve asked for information related to those illegal acts.”

She pointed to a visit last fall by Williamson to Washington, D.C., when the agency announced he was lobbying federal legislators to ease toll road regulations.

The Texas attorney general’s office, representing TxDOT, has challenged Hall’s right to sue the government, while simultaneously claiming that no illegal acts have been committed.

“Basically, the state claimed that TxDOT didn’t do anything illegal and therefore our suit should be tossed,” said Hall. “We claim that the department did act illegally, but [we] can’t show that until we get documentation — on telephone calls, Williamson’s travel expenses, and whom he met with in D.C., the companies hired to promote toll roads, and so forth.”

In a surprising legal twist, Judge Orlinda Naranjo ruled in December that Hall and TURF did have the right to pursue their suit, but asked that they limit the amount of documentation they were requesting. TURF attorney Charles Riley said a narrower request has been filed.

“Our suit basically has two prongs,” Riley said. “The first is that the Keep Texas Moving campaign is an illegal attempt by the government to engage in political advocacy. TxDOT is claiming that campaign is over, so there’s no reason to give us information on it. But we’ve got documentation to show there are plans for future campaigns, and that’s what we want to follow.”

The second prong deals with the lobbying issue, which Riley, like Hall, said is illegal. “It’s very clear that the department of transportation was lobbying the state legislature in the last session to kill the toll road moratorium. And they also lobbied [Congress] seeking to toll existing roads.” Records on those activities, he said, are public information.

Assistant Atty. Gen. Kristina Silcocks has argued that the Texas Transportation Code allows the agency to “engage in marketing, advertising, and other activities to promote the development and use of toll projects.”

Hall has also filed a complaint with Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, whose office investigates crimes related to the operation of state government. “If we really want to know what took place in the back room when the deals for parceling out the Trans-Texas Corridor to foreign companies were cut, it’s going to take a criminal investigation,” Hall said.

Travis County prosecutor Beverly Matthews said the complaint is being considered. “We’re weighing the merits to see if a criminal investigation is in order.”

But while Hall’s lawsuit — and a possible criminal investigation — could become a major thorn in TxDOT’s side, the loss of Williamson has to be a stunning blow to the department. The fiery commissioner frequently spoke of toll roads as the only way out of Texas’ current shortfall in road-building funds. He was often described as the person Perry most trusted to take the public hits for his vision of the Trans-Texas Corridor, a vast proposal of superhighways to be built and operated by private firms.

“Very few people can do what Williamson did,” said Hall. “There may not be anyone else as willing to front for Perry as he was.”

But while Perry is no doubt looking for a successor to Williamson, Hall would prefer that the department do a lot more than find a new chairman. “I think it’s time to make TxDOT more responsible to the people of Texas, and under Williamson’s leadership that didn’t happen and wasn’t going to happen,” she said. With the whole department up for sunset review in 2009, Hall would like to see it run under the leadership of an elected official, rather than a political appointee. “An elected official would have the public to answer to,” she said. “And with the sunset provision coming up, this is the perfect time for TxDOT to start over and have the whole department remodeled.”

Fighting Perry on toll roads is still an uphill battle, but Hall said she’s optimistic, given the growth of the grassroots opposition movement. “If we don’t believe that it [revamping the whole transportation agency] could happen, it won’t. If enough people want it to, and if politicians understand that there will be consequences for what they do, it could,” she said. “And that’s where you start.”