Truth Be Tolled

'E-N's verdict on 1604-281 mess reeks of favors'

"Try checking in with those who live in the interchange’s shadow. Hollywood Park Mayor Bob Sartor (local GOP precinct chair — no hugger of blind salamanders) said residents there object to the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority and TxDOT suggesting that there would be no negative effects from the interchange as designed. 'We adamantly disagree with the Categorical Exclusion’s finding there are no ill health effects associated with this project. I haven’t found any that agree with the ARMA.' Nobody but the [Express-News’s]  influential editorial board, that is."

--Greg Harman of the San Antonio Current

Read the rest of his commentary here.

Runaway toll fees at TxDOT

According to The Burnt Orange Report and KXAN-TV, the state of Texas is charging motorists a 4,000 percent administrative fee for each toll they don’t pay after 112 days. Some motorists – even those with the proper tags – are finding themselves with thousands in fees for just a few bucks in overdue tolls.  

Adkisson to push no-toll proposal

By Josh Baugh

From Express-news

Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson on Monday will recommend stripping toll roads from the Metropolitan Planning Organization's plans and fixing some of the region's most congested corridors with freeway expansions.

The move would represent a sweeping policy change for the MPO board, of which Adkisson is chairman, as well as a major victory for toll opponents, who say the concept of tolling in Bexar County would die altogether if Adkisson's plan proves successful.

Terri Hall, founder and director of two anti-toll groups — the San Antonio Toll Party and Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom — has played a substantial role in the forming of Adkisson's plan. The portion that deals with U.S. 281 on the far North Side is exactly what Hall and her groups have been demanding for years.

“We're going to make them non-toll roads like they were in 2001,” Hall said, referring to a Texas Department of Transportation plan that called for overpasses at some major intersections on U.S. 281 north of Loop 1604. The plan never came to fruition and was replaced by one that would build tolled lanes instead.

Since Adkisson, a toll opponent, was elected MPO chairman in July, Hall has seen her power and influence multiply. Hall now has an ally in the top position of the organization. She appears to essentially have a seat at the table — she made a lengthy presentation at an MPO board meeting this summer and has helped craft the proposal that Adkisson will introduce Monday.

“The sense that Commissioner Adkisson and I are getting when we meet with elected officials is that toll roads are finished,” Hall said.

The 19-member MPO board will discuss the proposal Monday, but a vote won't come until a board meeting next month.

The MPO controls the purse strings of all transportation projects that include federal funding but doesn't do any construction. The Alamo Regional Mobility Authority, TxDOT and local governments are charged with building the projects.

Adkisson aims to amend the MPO's short- and long-range plans by removing tolling proposals from segments of Loop 1604, U.S. 281 and Bandera Road. The amendment would require shifting money and would likely affect other transportation projects.

Because the changes deal with state funding, they would also have to pass muster with the Texas Transportation Commission, a five-member board appointed by Gov. Rick Perry, an ardent toll advocate. The TTC's chairwoman, Deirdre Delisi, is Perry's former chief of staff.

But Hall and Adkisson don't see that as a substantial obstacle because Perry can't afford to cross voters on the far North Side who don't want tolls, they say.

“Pressure works in favor of anyone seeking to change the status quo,” Adkisson said. “The status quo on 281 North and 1604 has got to go.”

Hall was more explicit.

“I dare Rick Perry — in an election year with all anti-toll opponents — to vote this down,” she said.

Adkisson's plan would reduce the cost of a U.S. 281 project from Loop 1604 to the county line from $475 million to $200 million, expanding the road to include six to eight lanes and overpasses. It would call for building all eight direct connectors between U.S. 281 and Loop 1604, rather than just the four southern connectors that the Alamo RMA plans to construct.

The plan would also expand Loop 1604 from Texas 151 to Bandera Road with six to eight non-tolled lanes, and it would remove plans to build toll lanes on Bandera between Loop 410 and Loop 1604.

Can it be done?

MPO board members learned about Adkisson's proposal Friday morning when the organization released an updated agenda for Monday's board meeting. Some officials say they're not sure that Adkisson's plan would work.

“If it can happen, I'm all for it,” said County Commissioner Kevin Wolff, an MPO board member. “If you can prove this up, then let's go to town.”

City Councilman Ray Lopez said he is reserving opinion until he better understands Adkisson's plan. He wants to see how it would affect the funding of other projects in the region.

Others say they won't support it at all.

“We don't support it at the Texas Department of Transportation because in so supporting it, we lose over $900 million of transportation infrastructure,” said Clay Smith, a TxDOT planning engineer who sits on the MPO board. “That leaves hundreds of thousands of motorists for generations to come in gridlock. We don't think that's the right thing to do.”

Smith said Adkisson's plan would kill any expansion on other parts of U.S. 281 and Loop 1604 for the next 25 years, leaving those portions exactly as they are today.

The Alamo RMA, which has tolling power, is the agency slated to build highway expansions on U.S. 281 and Loop 1604. The agency received federal environmental clearance Friday to build a “superstreet” on U.S. 281, which is expected to temporarily ease congestion until the RMA can build more capacity.

The RMA also is conducting massive environmental studies on the two highways and a smaller study of an interchange project on the southern side of the 281/1604 intersection, where the agency plans to build four non-tolled connectors with federal stimulus money.

But TxDOT's Smith said the project's stimulus funding could be jeopardized by Adkisson's desire to build all eight connectors at once.

Adkisson said he expects there to be ample opposition.

“It won't take long for dark imaginings to be showcased by the just-say-no-to-anything-new crowd, and those who are ensconced in the thinking of the past that would have us tolling these roads,” he said. “I would think anybody who wants to defeat this will attempt to suggest that the sky is falling, the world is coming to an end, life as we know it will never be the same again, because that's a tried-and-true, age-old tactic.”

RMA spokesman Leroy Alloway, who contended that the plan was Hall's — as opposed to Adkisson's — questioned Friday whether the details on funding and environmental issues in the proposal would be plausible.

“We look forward to seeing what Ms. Hall's plan is. We've said from Day One that if there's another plan that works, we'd look at it,” he said. “We want to see what she has to say and what she's going to present.”

RMA and TxDOT officials say there's no available funding for non-tolled highway expansion plans, despite what Hall says.

Vote in October

The debate starts Monday, with the decision coming a month later. Adkisson said he plans to hold the October meeting in the evening on the North Side so constituents can attend. Adkisson said the MPO meetings, typically held on one Monday a month at 1:30 p.m., are “anti-citizen, inconvenient (and) citizen/user unfriendly.”

Hall shared the same sentiment.

When the MPO board meets in October to vote on Adkisson's proposal, it'll do it in front of a packed house of toll opponents rather than a room full of highway lobbyists who are paid to baby-sit the meetings, she said.

Adkisson and Hall say they believe they have enough support on the MPO to move the non-toll proposal forward. What remains to be seen is whether they do.

“I'm depending on all of them to join hands and march down this road as a show of solidarity of this community that we want this to be done without tolls,” Adkisson said.

Perry's opponent uses toll road plan as ammo

By Kelley Shannon

From Associated Press 

Gov. Rick Perry ditched his plan to build a $175 billion network of toll roads that would crisscross the state after it ran into strong opposition, but he hasn't been able to shake the issue altogether.

Perry cast his Trans-Texas Corridor project as a way to relieve Texas' traffic congestion by building highways in a state growing by 1,000 people per day.

But he had to scale down the project considerably after it ran into opposition from farmers and ranchers, who said it threatened their land, and open government advocates, who derided its secret contract with a Spanish company.

Now a fellow Republican, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, has seized on the road project as she seeks to take his job, saying the project and Perry's transportation policies smack of arrogance.

"It's part of the overall argument — he's been there too long and look at the things he's failed at," Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said in describing Hutchison's strategy.

Toll roads and transportation alone may not be enough to turn an election, but Hutchison seems to be using them as a way to raise questions about Perry's competence, Henson said.

Perry, the state's longest-serving leader who is seeking a third full term, faces Hutchison and party activist Debra Medina in the GOP primary in March. Though recent polls have shown Perry with a lead over Hutchison, they also show large numbers of undecided voters, indicating the public isn't fully paying attention yet. The Republican primary winner is expected to be the favorite heading into the fall 2010 general election.

Perry proposed the sweeping toll road and high-speed rail corridor in 2002. The name "Trans-Texas Corridor" is now gone, but two key roads in the project — one parallel to Interstate 35 and another that is to be Interstate 69 running from northeast Texas to the Rio Grande Valley — remain in the planning stages.

"We have to continue to move people and the products of companies that call Texas home," said Perry campaign spokesman Mark Miner.

Hutchison has yet to present her own plan but she says she wants to reform and expand a state transportation commission. Her campaign says she opposes toll roads unless local officials and voters agree to them, and they say she worked in the Senate to halt federally funded toll roads.

"It is time to return to our tradition of free, quality highways and roads," Hutchison said in kicking off her campaign last month. She calls the Trans-Texas Corridor "the biggest land grab in the history of Texas."

An interest group that opposes toll roads, Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom, is looking closely at candidates from both parties, said its founder and direct, Terri Hall.

"Most of our supporters are well aware that we're in the anybody-but-Perry mode," Hall said. The group has not endorsed anyone in the governor's race, but a Democratic candidate, Hank Gilbert, is active in the group.

In arguing against state-orchestrated toll roads and for private property rights, Hutchison plays up her close ties to the Texas Farm Bureau, which opposes the toll road corridor. She sides with its stance on eminent domain, and pointed that out following Perry's veto of a property rights bill the bureau backed in 2007.

Perry, too, is trying to show he cares deeply about property rights, and earlier this year voiced support for a state constitutional amendment banning the government from taking private property and giving it to a developer to boost the local tax base.

This isn't the first time Perry has defended himself on toll roads in an election. Independent candidate Carole Keeton Strayhorn unsuccessfully ran against Perry in 2006 by attacking his toll road project.

Strayhorn's campaign privately acknowledged at the time the strategy might help win over rural voters, but not the urban voters who are key to victory. And those are voters Hutchison will need in March.

Perry's spokesman equates Hutchison's toll roads complaints with Strayhorn's.

"It's almost identical," Miner said, "and it shows that criticism is not a solution." 

Attorney General rejects toll projects

By Michael Lindenberger

From The Dallas Morning News

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has refused to sign off on the first of two major private toll road projects approved for North Texas earlier this year.

Abbott said provisions in the contract with the Spanish firm Cintra, which is slated to build the North Tarrant Express in Fort Worth and the mid-cities, violate the Texas Constitution and must be amended.

State law gives Abbott the power to hold up the contracts indefinitely if they are not "legally sufficient."

Negotiations between his office and the department have already extended for weeks beyond an initial 60-day deadline.

Cintra has agreed to spend billions in North Texas to build the North Tarrant Express toll road and to rebuild the LBJ Freeway.

But in return, the state department of transportation has pledged more than $1 billion in tax dollars toward the projects. As a result, main lanes on both highways will be free, but Cintra will collect tolls for 52 years on adjacent lanes.

The LBJ Freeway contract has not yet been reviewed, but it is likely to be saddled with the same legal issues.

Abbott said the department's contract for the North Tarrant Express obligates the state to pay $740 million over several years to Cintra.

"The Texas Constitution says that one Legislature cannot financially bind a future Legislature," he said.

The contract must be amended to reflect that any promises for payment are subject to discretion of future sessions of the Legislature, Abbott said.

Any provision that leaves payments from the state subject to future action by the Legislature could give Cintra pause.

TxDOT continues to work to meet Abbott's objections and to settle on terms agreeable to Cintra, spokesman Chris Lippincott said.

Senate votes out TxDOT overhaul

By Jim Vertuno of Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas Senate on Monday night approved its version of a major overhaul to the state's road-building agency, including allowing voters in counties in the state's largest metro areas to raise gas taxes to pay for road projects.

The Senate bill to renew the Texas Department of Transportation also would keep the agency's five-member commission, even though the governor-appointed panel would be subjected to closer scrutiny from lawmakers.

Those two provisions are major differences between the Senate and House with the June 1 end of the session looming.

The Senate would allow 30 counties in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso and Corpus Christi metro areas to hold local elections to raise gas taxes by up to 10 cents per gallon and raise vehicle registration fees.

Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, said it will provide much-needed to money to build roads for those cities' bursting populations.

"Those areas have the greatest population and the greatest mobility needs," Carona said.

And while the Senate wants to keep the agency commission intact, the House wants to replace it with a single statewide elected commissioner and divert much of the embattled agency's power to local commissions.

The House plan would strip much of Gov. Rick Perry's power to influence one of the state's most important agencies, one that that has come under withering criticism in recent years as it plowed ahead with Perry's vision for the Trans-Texas Corridor, a superhighway system of roads, railway and utility lines crisscrossing Texas.

The Senate would keep the commission but reduce the length of terms from six years to two. That could greatly expand the Senate's influence over the agency because the Senate confirms the governor's appointments.

With the end of the session a week away, some lawmakers worried the rush on such a massive bill would create more problems.

"I hope we don't add to the chaos and confusion that is already over there," said Sen. Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock.

The 14,000-employee agency has been a target for lawmakers this session. A recent review under the state "sunset" process called for revamping the department's governing bard and its dealings with lawmakers and the public.

"There was a lot of distrust," said Sen. Glenn Hegar, R-Katy, sponsor of the transportation rewrite.

Both the House and Senate versions would repeal the Trans-Texas Corridor. That won't prevent governments from pursuing toll roads, but the version planned for by Perry and some lawmakers in recent years is "dead," Hegar said.

The Trans-Texas Corridor came under fire almost since its inception. Rural landowners in particular were opposed to giving up their property for the project. Perry and other state officials had already said they were scrapping the original concept.

"In this bill it's dead. In the House bill it's dead," Hegar said. "It's dead."

Like the House bill, the Senate also voted to create new legislative oversight to review agency policy. The Senate also wants to prohibit the agency from lobbying state lawmakers.

The Senate came close to joining the House in banning the controversial use of red-light cameras. The House bill would phase them out and the Senate at first voted to add the same provision, but then changed its mind and removed the ban.

Senator Hutchinson fights double taxation in Washington

By Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson for the San Antonio Express-News

Maintaining and improving transportation infrastructure in Texas has become nearly as daunting a proposition as driving down Loop 410 at rush hour.

San Antonio and Texas as a whole have fast-growing populations, but face the challenge of crumbling and overstressed highways and consistent funding shortfalls. Clearly, something's got to give, and it can't be the quality of our roads — or fairness to Texas taxpayers. As we work to meet our transportation needs, we must think broadly and avoid band-aid solutions that will ultimately exacerbate the problem.

Recently, there have been renewed calls for tolls on highways that have already been built and paid for with federal tax dollars. I believe taxing Americans twice for the same asset is fundamentally unfair, and I oppose any effort to place tolls on existing interstate highways.

Double taxation is not the only concern. Overemphasis on tolling has serious implications for community safety and local infrastructure. Studies show that motorists will change their driving patterns to bypass the tolls. This will redirect traffic from our highways to remaining free roads, and, in turn, congest our local streets, compromise neighborhood safety, and overburden small-capacity infrastructure.

Furthermore, tolls on existing interstates will divert truck traffic to other roads. A recent study predicted that a 25-cent-per-mile toll on an interstate highway would cause nearly half the trucks to divert to other routes. Many of our communities are not equipped to handle heavy commercial traffic, and the safety of local drivers could be put at risk by the increased presence of trucks on small roads.

Today, I plan to introduce legislation to prevent tolling of existing free federal highways, bridges, or tunnels built with federal funding, so that taxpayers are not taxed to use a road for which they've already paid. I'm for more highways and even tolls, when proposed the right way. The legislation does not prohibit tolls on new construction.

If local communities and states want to cooperatively construct a toll road, they should be able to do so. If the state or community wants to expand their highways and toll for building new lanes, they can choose that alternative. In these situations, the taxpayers know exactly what they are getting. Many times a vote is required to approve these projects, but in any case, the taxpayers can hold the relevant officials accountable.

There has also been discussion in Texas and elsewhere of states attempting to purchase highways from the federal government and place them under state ownership or lease them to foreign investors for the purpose of tolling them. This is also an ill-conceived proposal that fails to address our underlying transportation challenges.

The debate on tolling illuminates the broader need to reform the federal highway program. Its antiquated funding formula, which has made Texas a donor state, is no longer serving the best interests of each state and its motorists. Our national transportation mission should evolve to maintaining and improving infrastructure, so that states don't resort to band-aid solutions, such as tolling existing freeways.

In April, I introduced a bill that would permit states to opt out of the federal highway program and instead be rebated federal fuel taxes collected within their borders. Today, Texas receives 92 cents back for every dollar sent to Washington, up from 76 cents from when I came to the Senate. My bill would allow Texas to finally see 100 percent of its gas tax dollars, and ensure all of our funds could be used to improve transportation in Texas.

Washington shouldn't take Texas tax dollars and send them to other states. Likewise, Texans shouldn't be charged time and time again to drive on roads they already paid for with their hard-earned tax dollars.

Kay Bailey Hutchison is the senior U.S. senator from Texas.

Legislators challenge Governor's veto power

I don't think the significance of this story should be overlooked.

By Ben Philpott for KUT Radio

Because Texas lawmakers pass the majority of their bill during the final days of the legislative session, the session is over before the governor vetoes legislation. Houston Republican Gary Elkins says that means lawmakers have no chance for an override.



Elkins: "I just want to bring the power back to the people we represent. The Constitution gives us the right to override governor vetoes. But as a practical matter, we're never here and never get the opportunity."

Elkins' Constitutional amendment would allow lawmakers to request a veto override, and with a majority of their colleagues in agreement, lawmakers would get called back to Austin. Will Lutz edits the Lone Star Report, a conservative political newsletter. He says the bill is a response to what some lawmakers view as an excessive amount of vetoes by Governor Perry.



Lutz: "The governor has vetoed local bills over larger policy disputes - over things like the Trans-Texas Corridor. He's vetoed things that even Republican legislators got a lot of grief from their constituents over like a property rights bill that protected people from eminent domain. And I think the legislators in the House have decided enough is enough."


This is the second time around for this amendment. It passed the House last year and fell flat in the Senate. A companion bill there this time around is still waiting for a committee hearing.

Feds yank environmental clearance for toll road

By Patrick Driscoll

From the San Antonio Express-News

For the second time in 21/2 years, the U.S. 281 tollway project has been brought to its knees, and officials say it could take up to two years to get back up.

Federal officials pulled the project's environmental clearance after the Texas Department of Transportation, reviewing records as part of a lawsuit filed in February, found problems with contracts to study endangered species.

Alamo Regional Mobility Authority officials, who had taken over the project from TxDOT, heard the news Wednesday.

“The 281 North toll project is stalled,” board member Henry Muñoz announced. “We don't know what the future of that project might be. There will be no projects moving forward on 281 North in the foreseeable future.”

As a somber Muñoz talked at the TransGuide center, agency Chairman Bill Thornton and Director Terry Brechtel were rushing to Austin to meet with Texas Transportation Commission Chairwoman Deirdre Delisi “to discuss the future of the 281 North Tollway and the future of the RMA.”

After the meeting, Brechtel said all is not lost, but it could take a year to fix the environmental study and up to another year to get another federal clearance and fight off another possible lawsuit.

“It will eventually come back to the community,” she said of the toll plan.

Toll-road critics and environmentalists, who filed the lawsuit to demand a more detailed environmental study, claimed yet another victory, a refrain to a similar lawsuit that stopped the project in early 2006.

“It's a huge victory for the taxpayers and the citizens who have worked tirelessly to get TxDOT and the RMA to come clean,” said Terri Hall, founder of Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom.

Plaintiff attorneys said the tainted contracts are just some of several problems uncovered by the lawsuit.

“They're waving the white flag,” said Bill Bunch of Save Our Springs Alliance. “That's what it seems like.”

Thornton said in a statement that everybody lost.

“Today is a sad day,” he said. “Anyone celebrating the end of this project, at this time, is also celebrating a stay in the status quo, a stay of congested roadways, of increasing frustrations and increased wastes of fuel.”

A $328 million construction contract for the toll road includes up to $60,000 a day for inflation, Brechtel said.

Officials had hoped to resolve the lawsuit and start work early next year, but the delay means the contract will have to be renegotiated or bid again.

Total project costs, including design, engineering and land acquisition, is expected to top $470 million.

The agency so far has spent about $6 million on plans for toll lanes along both U.S. 281 and Loop 1604. And TxDOT spent $2 million and a year updating the environmental study after the first lawsuit.

Hall and others say toll officials are to blame for refusing to scrap the 8-mile tollway and instead build a 3-mile freeway plus some overpasses as first planned.

They say the environmental studies never seriously considered impacts to motorists or the Edward's Aquifer.

What went down at the Sunset Review